Mumbai
Edition, 16th July 2008
Mumbai: Admissions to firstyear junior college
can continue without any further hiccups. The Bombay High
Court on Tuesday refused to stay the admission process based
on a PIL filed by a 15-year-old student, Fransisco Luis,
who is challenging the ‘normalisation’ of Class
X marks. The court posted the matter for a further hearing
on Thursday.
The refusal to halt admissions—already stalled once
over the 70:30 issue—may not please ICSE and CBSE
students, who say normalisation has given them a raw deal.
A bench comprising Chief
Justice Swatanter Kumar and Justice A P Deshpande kept telling
the state that its ‘formula’ to calculate percentiles
basically favoured only SSC students. “Is this justified?
Is it fair? Is it the correct way?’’ the Chief
Justice asked.
Government pleader Jyoti Pawar answered, “Yes, my
lord. But that is in fact the objective, to help meritorious
SSC students.’’ She said that SSC students were
scoring less in comparison with the “more liberal
marking system’’ adopted by the ICSE and CBSE
boards. As a result, in the top 100 on the merit list of
a college there would be no SSC student. The SSC student
was finding it difficult to get admission to “good’’
colleges and to settle the disparity the state, after “consultation
with the other boards and as advised by education experts’’,
adopted ‘normalisation’.
When the matter came up in a packed courtroom, the judges
wanted to understand the new system. Pawar said the percentage
of a prospective student was divided by the average percentage
of the top 10 students from a particular board and the result
was multiplied by 100 to get the percentile considered for
admissions. By this formula, an SSC student who gets 89%
finds himself getting a 95% percentile, while a similarly
scoring CBSE or ICSE student gets a lower percentile.
The judges said the “entire objective is to favour
the SSC student on the philosophy that CBSE is liberal with
its marking. This is like casting a stigma on CBSE’’.
“Your stand should be to bring a kind of opportunity
so that students don’t suffer. If you said that outside
students were displacing others then it’s another
thing. But what you are saying is that students from within
the state are taking away seats in better colleges and that
each student will no longer be judged on his own merit.
All students will get admission, the only question is to
which college. But at what cost? Education is governed by
three authorities and if that’s satisfied, is it fair
to say an SSC student should benefit over an ISCE or CBSE?’’
the judges asked.
Pawar said CBSE and ICSE students don’t have two compulsory
language papers and can score more. Xavier Luis, the father
of the student who has been unable to get admission after
getting 80%, said it was not true that ICSE has only one
language paper. The judges asked the state to get its facts
straight and asked the government lawyer to check the law
on ‘preferential treatment’.
To Luis, who argued himself and began by saying that rice,
be it basmati or ‘surti kolum’, was still rice,
the CJ said sharply, “Please don’t compare students
to rice. We are concerned with the academic careers of students.’’
The court added repeatedly, “Show us some violation
of a constitutional right here.’’ Luis said
the method was discriminatory and wanted to know who were
the ‘experts’ the state was referring to.
While Pawar said admissions had begun on June 12 and have
been “very successful’’ with “no
grievances so far on the use of the new system’’,
Luis said all these years admissions were based on the merits
of each student.
