The Supreme Court on Thursday issued notices to the Centre and the CBSE on a petition filed by a few engineering students challenging the “normalisation procedure” for admission to National Institutes of Technology (NITs) for the academic year 2013-2014.
“Any admission made by virtue of the interim policy would be subject to the final decision of this court,” said a Bench of Justice H L Dattu and Justice Dipak Misra.
Senior counsel U Lalit appeared for Priya Maurya, Priyanka Maurya, Puneet Bhatia and others.
As per the original policy indicated in the August 14, 2012 notification, 60 per cent weightage was given to the marks obtained in the JEE (Main) and 40 per cent weightage for the marks secured in the Class XII Board examination. But, the normalisation procedure notified after the results of JEE were announced makes the ratio topsy-turvy and gives prime importance to the marks obtained by a student in Class XII examination, Lalit contended.
The normalisation procedure can result in a situation where students with high JEE scores and slightly different Board marks get drastically different all-India ranks, Lalit argued. “This kind of criteria is entirely alien to the system. This is going to create complete imbalance,” he said.
The CBSE’s counsel Amarendra Sharan told the court that counselling was over and requested it not to pass any interim order. The Bench said the court would examine only whether a writ petition under Article 32 of the Constitution would go against government’s decisions in matters of education. The counsel replied that the Inamdar judgment was delivered on a writ petition under Article 32. The judgments in the Islamic Academy case and the TMA Pai case were delivered on writ petitions, all being educational matters.