According to the principle of de minimis non curat lex, which states that the law does not care about minor issues, the Rajasthan High Court denied the petitions of 31 candidates who took the NEET-UG 2025 exam in Sikar, Rajasthan, and requested a reexamination or bonus marks because of power outages and unfavorable weather at their testing locations. The 98 centers that were assigned in Sikar were considered by the bench of Justice Sameer Jain; of them, about 15 centers suffered because of a power outage that affected 5,390 candidates. Only thirty-one of these had contacted the Court. The Court stated that a large-scale, pan-India level exam could not be tainted by such isolated complaints by statistically insignificant students.
The petitioners' performance was significantly impacted by the power outage, which lasted anywhere from five to twenty-eight minutes. A valid classification between candidates who appeared in affected areas and those who appeared in non-affected areas was suggested to exist. Therefore, such a classification called for special consideration. On the contrary, the State argued that only 0.575% of the applicants who came from the Sikar centers had voiced any complaints about this. 99.5% of candidates seemed satisfied, with the exception of these few.
Furthermore, it was said that an Expert Committee was established to thoroughly examine the complaint and came to the conclusion that the time allocated in the impacted and unaffected centers was unchanged. The lawyer further argued that the petitioners and other candidates from the impacted centers received scores as high as 600, indicating excellent performance and that the petitioners could not be found to have suffered any significant harm.
After hearing the contentions, the Court took into account the minute proportion of Sikar candidates that had approached the Court, and opined that, “In view of such proportion, the principle de minimis non curat lex—the law does not concern itself with trifles—would squarely apply. As isolated grievances raised by a statistically negligible number of candidates cannot, by themselves, vitiate a large-scale examination conducted at a PAN India level.” It was held that power outages were due to storm and rains which were vis major events, beyond the control of any party. Hence, it could not be accepted that the State ought to have ensured uninterrupted power supply.