The Hindu: New Delhi: Friday, August
19, 2016.
Apex court
asks CBSE to “scrupulously” follow its 2011 judgment.
The Supreme
Court has asked the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to
“scrupulously” follow its 2011 judgment that it is a student’s “fundamental and
legitimate right” to access his answer sheets under the Right to Information
Act.
The recent
order by a Bench led by Justice Ranjan Gogoi came on a plea by two students,
Kumar Shanu from Noida and Paras Jain from Delhi, seeking the court’s
permission to initiate contempt proceedings against the Board for charging
Rs.700 per copy of an answer sheet.
Over and
above this, students are compulsorily required to go through the process of
verification of marks for which they have to pay another Rs. 300 as fee. Only
then, would they be eligible to apply for a copy of their answer sheets.
In short,
they contended that a student ends up coughing up Rs. 1,000 to the CBSE to
obtain a physical copy of his answer sheet. The information came out in a reply
from the CBSE to an RTI application made by the petitioners.
The CBSE,
however, contended that the charges levied were incidental and not for profit.
The
petitioners contended that the practice was in contempt of a 2011 judgment CBSE
& Anr. Vs. Aditya Bandhopadhyay & Ors of the Supreme Court, which held
that an “answer sheet is an information under Section 2(f) of the RTI Act and
therefore, examinees/students have a fundamental and legal right of having
access to their answer sheets under RTI Act.”
Fiduciary
relationship
The 2011
judgment had held that there existed a fiduciary relationship between the
examining body and the student.
The
petitioners contended that the CBSE was levying these charges when the RTI Act
had intended students to access answer sheets, which qualify as ‘information’,
for Rs. 2 a page along with Rs. 10 for the RTI application. It had argued that
students falling under the Below Poverty Line category were guaranteed free
access to their answer sheets under the law.
“It is
ironical and astonishing that the CBSE, being an educational institution
responsible for educating a large section of the society, is blatantly flouting
the law laid down by the Supreme Court,” the petition said.
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