NTA postpones Joint CSIR-UGC-NET exam due to 'unavoidable circumstances'

New Delhi: A day after the union education minister pointed at lapses at the conduct of the NEET exam, and two days after the UGC-NET exams were cancelled, the National Testing Agency (NTA) on Friday announced that the CSIR-UGC-NET exams will be postponed due to “unavoidable” circumstances. 

“The candidates are hereby informed that the Joint CSIR-UGC-NET Examination June-2024 which was scheduled to be held between 25.06.2024 to 27.06.2024 is being postponed due to unavoidable circumstances as well as logistic issues. The revised schedule for the conduct of this examination will be announced later through the official website,” an announcement by the NTA stated. The exams were announced on June 15. 

The CSIR-UGC-NET is a qualifying exam for the post of lecturers in science subjects. While the UGC-NET exam is an entrance test across 84 subjects, the CSIR-UGC-NET is taken by science students  across five subjects – Chemical Science, Earth Science, Life Science, Physics, Mathematics. 

Though it remains unclear, the exams could have been postponed since the process was compromised. On Wednesday, the ministry had cancelled the UGC-NET test on the “basis of inputs from Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C)”. 

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan had said that the NET exams were cancelled after the I4C section of the home ministry informed the UGC Chairperson at 3pm on Wednesday that questions papers were found on the darknet. “Some of these questions were distributed in Telegram. Tracking and regulating messages on the platform in the absence of laws is a challenge in itself,” he had said. 

The ministry has been facing a lot of flak over the issue of irregularities in the conducting of entrance tests such as NEET and NET. The NEET test has been dragged to court, and it has since emerged that two candidates in Bihar paid money for the question papers. With mounting pressure from the Opposition, Pradhan said that the irregularities were an “institutional failure” of the NTA and that he was taking “moral responsibility” for the matter. Pradhan had initially said that the NTA was not at fault.