NEET Paper Translations: High Court Directs CBSE to Answer four questions

Madurai: The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has been directed by the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court to render replies to 4 questions posed by it on the measures taken to ensure a fair competition for Tamil students entering the National Eligibility Entrance Test(NEET) fray at the next hearing.

A recent report in the new Indian Express quotes the bench of Justice A M Basheer Ahamed and Justice C T Selvam as quering

1. Whether the board had undertaken any work to find out which of the words in English (i.e technical and scientific terms) did the students find impossible to translate to Tamil;


2. and if the findings did come up with such terms, had the Board compiled a dictionary of these words with their Tamil translations.


3. The Judges further questioned whether if they had a compilation of these translated words, had the tutors who conducted NEET coaching classes been made aware of their existence.


4. If there was such a compilation, has the CBSE informed the teachers, who conducted classes for the Tamil medium students, about the existence of the compilation.

The court also questioned whether the Board had made any effort to educate Tamil students regarding English words for parts of body and plants also having Tamil equivalents.

The court has directed submission of answers to the above-stated questions in the form of Affidavits at the next court hearing on Friday reported TNIE.

The court also refused a stay on the refusing to accept the ongoing medical counselling by the petitioner. The Judges clarified that no orders would be passed in between as the counselling had already been scheduled by the Board and added that they would wait for the Board’s submission on the court’s queries.

Earlier, a Rajya Sabha, MP T.K. Rangarajan had filed a public interest litigation petition before the High Court Bench seeking additional marks to the Tamil medium students for errors witnessed in the Tamil version of the NEET question paper. He had claimed that there at least 49 questions had been wrongly translated, leading to the students getting confused, reports Hindu.

He sought a grant of a total of 196 marks for the wrongly translated questions. The errors in the paper were pointed out by Tech4all, a non-governmental organization, which studied the question paper in a comprehensive manner before pointing at the errors.

In an earlier report done by Medical Dialogues in the mentioning of errors it was stated that the Tamil translation of cheetah was given as ‘siruthai’, which had been printed as ‘seetha’ in the question paper (question no. 75).

The NGO representative had said that similar errors had occurred in 47 other questions and the CBSE ought to grant grace marks for all these questions, said Teach For All founder G B Ram Prakash. “This means, every candidate who took up the test in Tamil should get 196 points as grace marks.”

Read also: 49 translation errors in NEET Tamil question paper: NGO