AJAY TEWARI, J.

1. By this petition the petitioner is seeking direction to the respondent to issue result of the petitioner by treating the answer of question Nos.44 & 71 as correct and not to take into consideration the subsequent change in the Answer Key in the Joint CSIR-Net December, 2016 official answer key booklet-B.

2. The admitted facts are that the petitioner (who is M.Sc. in the discipline of Applied Physics) applied for the Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) and Eligibility for Lectureship (NET Exam) conducted by the respondent-CSIR in December, 2016 in the subject of Physical Sciences. She obtained 67 marks (33.50%) which was below 75.76 marks (37.88%), the cut off fixed for the unreserved category of JRF and 68.18 marks (34.09%), the cut off fixed for the unreserved category of Lecturer. The dispute has arisen with regard to the answers for two questions i.e. question No.44 and question No.71 of booklet B.

3. After the conduct of the examination the respondent uploaded the answer key (as prescribed by the original experts who had set the paper) on its website and as per that answer key the options which had been marked by the petitioner were correct. Further, as per the practice, the respondent invited objections in respect of the answer key and apparently objections with regard to these two questions (alongwith others) were received. These objections were referred to a different set of experts who recommended that the options originally prescribed as correct were in fact wrong. These recommendations were accepted and the revised result issued. With this change in the result the total of the petitioner was reduced by 10.825 marks. This was because had her options been accepted as correct she would have been entitled for 8.5 marks and, because they were held to be wrong; she lost a further 2.325 marks on account of negative marking. If she had not suffered this loss she would have qualified the test both for the category of JRF and Lecturer. By way of present petition she has challenged this change in the answer key which has worked to her prejudice as mentioned above.

4. The stand of the respondent is that it is a Premier National R&D Organization of the country and has formulated this method of evaluation 'with a view to promote transparency in its mechanism of conduct of examination to ensure justice to candidates'. It has adopted the system of displaying/uploading answer keys on its website and inviting representations/objections from the candidates pertaining to discrepancy either relating to the Questions or Answer Keys. Further that the representations received are duly considered before finalization of results. The petitioner has also filed a replication. Alongwith the replication the petitioner has annexed the opinions statedly received from Professor W.A. Zajc, who is the I.I. Rabi Professor of Physics, Columbia University, New York and Professor Subir Sarkar from the Oxford University, Department of Physics, according to whose opinions, the answers given by the petitioner were in fact correct. By way of illustration the answer provided by Professor W.A. Zajc is reproduced herein below:-

“Email dated 22.06.2017 at 4.24 AM:

This is best solved using four-vectors to simultaneously conserve momemtum and energy. Let k be the photon four-vector = (k,0,0,k), so k is also its energy. The minimum photon energy leaves m_3 and m_1 at rest in their center-of-mass system. So in units where c=1, the four-vector equation is.....

Email dated 26.06.2017 at 3.32 AM:

Congratulations on working through this to the right answer. I too calculated 19.5(6) MeV. Since this is derived in a straightforward way given the input data, it is correct, and all of the options are technically wrong. I would guess that the authors calculated their answer by separately conserving energy and momentum, and made some numerical round-off errors, leading them to 19.3 MeV, which after all is within a percent or so of the correct answer.”

5. The si