In a victory for democracy, the Supreme Court last week directed IIT Dhanbad to admit an 18-year-old Dalit boy who had lost his seat for missing the deadline for depositing fees of Rs 17,500. While passing the order, the top court evoked the plenary powers granted by Article 142 of the Constitution that empowers it to administer complete justice.
Atul Kumar, the son of a daily wager, hails from a below-poverty-line family from Titora village in Muzaffarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh. His father, who earns about Rs 450 a day, found it difficult to raise the amount by the June 24 deadline to block the seat for his son’s BTech course in electrical engineering. By the time he raised the amount through crowd-funding from his villagers, it was past the deadline. When the parents approached the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and the Jharkhand Legal Services Authority, the latter suggested that they move the Madras High Court to save the seat as it was IIT Madras that had conducted the exam. The case subsequently came before the Supreme Court, which stressed that a talented student like Atul from a marginalised group ”should not be left out”, and directed IIT Dhanbad to secure his admission to the batch he was selected for.
This is not the first time the judiciary has come to the rescue of students “left out”. The case highlights that talented and deserving students—more so those from marginalised sections—can find the bureaucratic mandates of educational institutions insurmountable. The institutions need flexibility in fee payments for deserving students rather than settle for the seats going to the next best. They need to keep in mind foremost the valuable role talented students can play for the country in general and their communities in particular.
The focus should surely be on nurturing talented students irrespective of their caste, community or economic background. But institutions can also maintain a corpus to allow credit on fee payments for students from marginalised backgrounds. A certain degree of lenience in such cases would go a long way to hold on to the valuable human resource that this country boasts of, rather than wail later over the lack of competent manpower.