Chennai: The Madras high court dismissed a petition which sought direction to the Central Government and other authorities to conduct IIT-Joint Engineering Examinations (JEE) in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Gujarati, Oriya, Assamese and other regional languages.
The first bench of Chief Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Justice T S Sivagnanam, before which a PIL filed by R Ovia came up for hearing, refused to entertain the petition stating that the question falls within the policy the government.
M Radhakrishnan, counsel for the petitioner, submitted that the objective type questions designed to test the comprehensive reasoning and analytical ability of candidates, would compel non-Hindi speaking candidates to opt for English. He sought the government to introduce multi-lingual question papers and the examination must be conducted in all the 32 recognised regional languages listed in the VIII Schedule of the Constitution. The candidates from rural terrain are facing problem in the pattern since they appear for HSC courses in the mother tongue or regional languages.
The Central government replied that the petitioner has referred the competitive examination was meant for employment and not for education. The medium of instruction at IIT is English, and lack of proficiency in English language will cause a problem to candidates.
Pointing out a 1990 verdict of the Supreme Court, the judges said, “whether the entrance examination should be held in multiple languages or dual language or a single language has to be left open to the institutions conducting the examinations.”
The bench said Citizens of India are not to be governed by the judges or judiciary. No aggrieved student has moved the court for remedy, which any case had become infructuous, as IIT-JEE examinations had been completed on April 8, 2012 itself, the bench added.
