Author: Aaryaman Suryavanshi
I. Case Title, Citation & Bench
Avni Prakash v. National Testing Agency (NTA) & Ors., 2021 SCC OnLine SC 1112, Civil Appeal No. 7000 of 2021 (arising out of SLP (C) No. 18591 of 2021), decided 23 November 2021, Supreme Court of India.
Coram: Dr. D.Y. Chandrachud and A.S. Bopanna, JJ. The opinion was authored by Chandrachud, J.
This appeal came up against a Division Bench judgment of the Bombay High Court dated 29 October 2021, which had denied the appellant’s writ petition filed under Article 226 of the Constitution.
II. Facts
Avni Prakash, the appellant, has Dysgraphia — a learning disability listed at Entry 2(a) of the Schedule to the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 (“RPwD Act”). She had a forty per cent permanent disability on record, which placed her within the statutory category of a “person with benchmark disability” under Section 2(r), and, more broadly, a “person with disability” under Section 2(s). Her disability certificate was first issued by L.T.M.G. Sion Hospital, Mumbai back in June 2017 and was later renewed, with a corrected version finally issued on 15 September 2021.
She sat for NEET-UG 2021 on 12 September 2021 at a centre affiliated to Thakur College of Engineering, Mumbai. Under Clause 5.4(b) of the NEET Bulletin 2021 — read along with the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment’s 2018 Guidelines on written examinations for benchmark-disabled candidates — she was entitled to an extra hour on top of the standard three-hour paper. She had handed in her certificate at the centre without any objection being raised, and had not asked for a scribe. The trouble was that the invigilating staff simply didn’t know she was entitled to the extra time, so her sheet was picked up along with everyone else’s once the three hours were up.
Understandably upset, she moved the Bombay High Court on 23 September 2021, asking that she be allowed to reappear with the accommodations she was owed. An interim order dated 30 September 2021 stopped NTA from declaring her result in the meantime. On 11 October 2021 the High Court asked NTA to decide her representation keeping in mind Vikash Kumar v. Union Public Service Commission, (2021) 5 SCC 370 — but when the matter finally came up for final hearing, the Division Bench dismissed her petition on 29 October 2021, apparently swayed by NTA’s argument that she ought to have produced a certificate in the prescribed Appendix VIII-B format from a notified centre. By then, results for close to 15.4 lakh NEET candidates had already been declared, on 1 November 2021; the appellant’s own rank stood at 1721 out of 2684 in the all-India PwD category, and 249 out of 390 within Maharashtra’s PwD list.
III. Issues
1. Was the appellant, being a PwBD candidate, entitled to the one hour of compensatory time promised under the NEET Bulletin 2021 and the 2018 Guidelines?
2. Did the prescribed Appendix VIII-B certificate have to be produced at the examination stage itself, or only later, at the point of admission?
3. Could the sheer scale of the examination, and the fact that results were already out, be used to shut the door on her individual grievance?
4. What relief, if any, was actually workable without upsetting the merit position of the thousands of other candidates who had already been ranked?
IV. Arguments (Both Sides)
Counsel for the appellant leaned heavily on Section 17(i) of the RPwD Act, which speaks of “inclusive education” through suitable modification of examination systems, arguing that the 2018 Guidelines were not advisory in nature but binding on every examining body, NTA included. It was also pointed out — relying on Vidhi Himmat Katariya v. State of Gujarat, (2019) 10 SCC 20 — that the Appendix VIII-A/VIII-B certification is really an admission-stage requirement, since a candidate can hardly be expected to know her rank before the result is even out. On this reading, the fault for the missed hour lay squarely with NTA and its centre staff, not with the appellant, and the Court’s earlier reasoning in Vikash Kumar demanded a more sympathetic, purpose-driven response rather than a technical one.
NTA’s response was fairly straightforward: no certificate in the required format from a notified centre meant no automatic right to compensatory time. It also stressed the practical difficulty of the situation — roughly 15.4 lakh candidates had already sat the exam, results were out, and counselling was already underway. Reopening the process for one candidate at this late stage, it argued, would be unfair to everyone ranked ahead of her. The scale of the exercise, in other words, made individual correction more or less unworkable.
V. Judgment
The Supreme Court didn’t go as far as ordering a re-examination — that, it felt, would unfairly disturb the ranks already assigned to other candidates. But it did find that the appellant had lost her compensatory hour through no fault of her own, notwithstanding her clear entitlement as both a PwD and a PwBD candidate. NTA’s insistence on the Appendix VIII-B certificate at the exam stage was, the Court held, simply mistaken — that format belongs to the admission stage, not the examination itself. NTA was directed to work out, within a week, what steps could be taken to make good the injustice done to her, in coordination with the Directorate General of Health Services. Looking beyond this one case, the Court also directed that future NEET Bulletins spell out PwD and PwBD entitlements more clearly, that benefits meant for PwD candidates generally not be squeezed by importing the stricter PwBD threshold, that the benchmark-disability standard continue to apply for reservation under Section 32 and age relaxation, and that NTA staff and exam-centre personnel be regularly sensitised and trained on how reasonable accommodation actually works in practice.
VI. Legal Reasoning & Personal Commentary
The Bench read Section 17(i) together with Sections 2(r) and 2(s) of the RPwD Act as creating an ongoing, purposive duty of reasonable accommodation — not a box-ticking exercise that could be defeated on a technicality. Leaning on Vikash Kumar v. Union Public Service Commission, it treated the extra hour as something the appellant was owed as a matter of right, not as a favour NTA could withhold at will. What stands out most, though, is the Court’s refusal to let the sheer size of the exam become an excuse. The observation that behind the “abstract number of 15 lakh students” lie real, individual lives is, frankly, the heart of the judgment — it is easy for a bureaucracy to hide behind statistics, and the Court wasn’t having it.
Reading the judgment as a student, I found it one of the more human decisions to come out of this line of disability jurisprudence. It doesn’t get lost in abstraction; it stays anchored to what actually happened to one candidate on one exam day. At the same time, I’m not entirely convinced the relief granted was as strong as the reasoning behind it. Telling NTA to merely “consider” a remedy within a week is a fairly soft direction for a Court that had just delivered such a pointed rebuke — there’s a gap between the strength of the language and the concreteness of what was actually ordered. Still, the forward-looking directions on clearer bulletins and staff training probably matter more in the long run than anything that could have been done for Ms. Prakash alone. If nothing else, the case is a handy reminder that “too many people are affected” is not, by itself, a good enough reason to deny one person their due.
