NEW DELHI: In a ray of hope to many students who faced technical glitches while taking online
Common Law Admission Test (
CLAT), the
Supreme Court on Friday asked a two-member committee headed by former Kerala high court judge to examine their grievances before declaring the results for admission in law colleges.
CLAT 2018 was conducted on May 13 by
National University of Advanced Legal Studies (NUALS), Kochi and the result is scheduled to be declared on May 31. Many law aspiring students from almost 200 online examination centres faced problems in taking the exam. The problems included power cuts, failure of log-in system and slow biometric verification, resulting in substantial loss of time for the candidates.
After the intervention of the Supreme Court which asked NUALS to come out with some solution to address the grievances of students, the University told a bench of Justices AM Khanwilkar and
Indu Malhotra that it had appointed a two-member committee headed by retired Kerala high court judge Justice MR Hariharan Nair to look into the issue.
Appreciating the University for setting up grievances readdressal committee within a day on its suggestion, the bench set a deadline of 7 pm till May 27 for the students to file online complaints regarding the problems faced in taking the examination. It asked the committee to scrutinise all complaints which were filed earlier or will be filed in the coming days till May 27 and recommend remedial action to be taken by the appropriate authority.
The court asked the committee to file the status report by May 30 when it will further hear the case, a day before the result is to be declared.
Senior advocate
Salman Khurshid, appearing for some aggrieved students, pleaded the court to direct the University not to declare the result but the bench said that it will take a call on it after going through the status report.
The court was hearing the pleas filed by six candidates who appeared for the CLAT, seeking a direction to quash the examination and hold it afresh. They alleged that the candidates faced several technical problems during the on-line test, besides poor infrastructure at examination centres and lack of proper guidance from staffers.
As some of the students have approached high courts of Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Bombay, Punjab and Haryana and Rajasthan on the problems faced by them in examination, the apex court also decided to transfer those cases to itself for adjudication. It had earlier asked the high court not to proceed in those cases as the matter was being examined by it.
