Chennai: The Madras high court has directed the Tamil Nadu school education department to exempt students of minority language from writing Tamil paper in the current academic year exams also as it was done last year. The first bench comprising acting Chief Justice Huluvadi G. Ramesh and Justice R. Mahadevan, passed the order when a batch of PILs from the linguistic minority institutions came up for hearing on Monday.
The petitioners sought for a direction to the state school education authorities to exempt students belonging to other states and having different mother tongues from writing the Tamil language exam.They also sought for direction to authorities to permit students to write the exam in their respective mother tongue language instead of Tamil.Senior counsel M. Ravindran submitted that even though the Act of Compulsory Tamil was enacted in the year 2006 it was brought into force only in the year 2014 and all the schools were informed about it only on June 3, 2014.
The bench directed the government to continue the order passed by it on March 3, 2016 exempting the linguistic minority students from writing the Tamil language exam this year also. The exercise of exempting the students from writing the exam shall be completed within two days as the examination is scheduled to begin in the month of March.
