Bombay HC pulls up Navodaya Vidyalaya Scheme officials over 'hyper technical approach' to admissions

MUMBAI: Is the objective of the Maharashtra government's Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya Scheme being fulfilled when authorities blindly adopt a hyper-technical approach to deny education to those entitled, the Bombay High Court asked in a case related to admission of five students.

A division bench of Justices Gautam Patel and Neela Gokhale, in a judgment passed on February 17, quashed a November 2021 order passed by the concerned authority cancelling admission granted to five 11-year-olds in the Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya School in Ratnagiri for Class 6. Admission is made on the basis of Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya Selection Test (JNVST), designed and conducted by the CBSE.

As per the plea, the five children, originally from Kolhapur, were Class 5 students of a government run school in Ratnagiri. They claimed they had filled out applications to appear for the JNVST for securing admission in the Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya in Ratnagiri for Class 6.

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The JNVST– 2021, which was to be held in March 2021 was rescheduled on three occasions due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and was finally held in August 2021. All five petitioners appeared and their names were in the merit list when the results were declared on September 28, 2021.

They submitted their documents online and were granted admission. However, in November 2021 their admissions were cancelled on various grounds, including that they were in the middle of Class 5 when they secured admission and also that they were from Kolhapur and, hence, cannot be granted admission to a school in Ratnagiri.

The bench, however, refused to accept these grounds and said merely reciting that the parents stay in Kolhapur district is insufficient. "There is no law that a child may not be sent away from his hometown for the purposes of education," it said. Once admission is granted, it cannot be cancelled on the basis that one year has not been completed (because the year began late owing to the pandemic), the bench said.

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The court also pondered whether the objective of government was to assist students in getting education, particularly in stressful and unprecedented times such as the pandemic, or to blindly adopt some hyper-technical approach to deny education to those entitled in law to it.

"We must ask the questions as to what purpose is being served by this action and whether the object of the Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya Scheme is in fact being fulfilled," the court said. "As to the question of delay and laches, we are unable to understand how this can ever be taken by a body that is set up to promote education and to use it against students seeking an education," it added.

The bench quashed the impugned order of November 2021 which cancelled the five students admission and directed the Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya at Ratnagiri to forthwith grant admission to the five students in Class VII for the academic year 2022-23.