Tanvi Sinha
The Karnataka High Court on Wednesday, January 13th 2021 issued a notice to the state in the petition filed on behalf of 120 students who spoke against holding the physical examination in VTU or Visvesvaraya Technological University.
A single-judge bench of Justice R Devdas took cognisance of the petition even though they doubted that the court should be the one to take this kind of a decision as it seems to have been done by the university as per procedure issued by Centre and state.
Regardless, the court went forward with the matter.
The students, represented by Advocate Tanvi Dubey, presented their case stating that it was not their intention to cancel exams as a whole but only to cancel physical examinations.
The grounds of cancellation would be medical health reasons and the fact that some students would have to travel all the way from other states and even other countries to give the exam.
However, the court remarked on how even the High Court was conducting physical examination offline and not online for civil judges.
The petitioners went on to state that there would be no social distancing between the students in the hostels and the messes and that VTU had issued a notice on 19th October that declared the examinations to be done online, but on December 9th VTU had issued notices stating they would hold exams offline.
This was fiercely rejected by the students and 1,373 students wrote to the Vice-Chancellor of VTU against the decision, which with the added fear of the new corona variant that was known off during the time of the notice.
The offline exams notice issued, made students more scared and in their petition, they highlighted a violation of Article 21and 14 under their right to health.
The court has decided to take up the matter further next week.