Delhi HC seeks response on UGC-NET June 2026 English re-test plea

The Delhi High Court has asked the National Testing Agency (NTA) and the Centre to share responses to a petition against the decision to re-conduct the University Grants Commission National Eligibility Test (UGC-NET) June 2026 English exam.

Justice Jasmeet Singh has sent notices to the Centre and NTA after a plea was filed by Parul Sheoran. She is a candidate who appeared for the UGC-NET June 2026 examination. The court has also asked the authorities on August 31 to consider whether the exam fee for the affected paper can be refunded.

This matter for further hearing has been scheduled on October 6. The petitioner has challenged an August 16 NTA notice that shared the re-conduct of the English paper and has asked the court to set aside the decision.

Candidate challenges UGC-NET June 2026 English re-test

The petition described NTA’s decision as unfair and unreasonable after alleging that it does not follow Article 14 of the Constitution, which offers the right to equality at all.

According to the plea, the decision for the examination was again taken without making public the material on which it was based. The petitioner also pointed out that the prescribed procedure under the UGC-NET June 2026 was not followed based on the information bulletin.

In case the court allows the English paper to be reconducted, the petitioner has requested that the examination fee paid for the original test should be refunded. The plea has also asked for permission to allow affected candidates to sit for the retest without an additional fee.

NTA cites question paper errors for re-conduct

The NTA conducted the UGC-NET June 2026 examination between June 22 and June 30 for 87 subjects. The examination identifies eligible candidates for Junior Research Fellowship (JRF), who will be joining as assistant professors, and gives admission to PhD courses. The agency had announced that the English and Commerce papers would be re-held on September 9, and the Sociology paper test would again be conducted on September 10.

NTA, in its public notice, said it had received multiple complaints about the errors in the question papers of the three subjects. Based on the complaints, the agency formed a committee to examine the issues and decided to conduct the examinations again for the affected papers.

PTI reports that, “According to the committee's report, "the three papers had many factual, typographical, and translation errors, including mis-spelt names of prominent scholars, garbled book titles, errors in the stem wording of questions, grammatical errors, gender and number agreement errors, punctuation mistakes, and non-standard coined terms for established concepts, as well as repetition of a significant number of questions previously administered."