The Delhi High Court has sought responses of the Centre and the Delhi University (DU) on some Kerala-based students’ plea to consider all languages, including Malayalam, given in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution to calculate ‘best of four’ marks for admission to colleges in the university.
Justice Siddharth Mridul issued a notice to the Ministry of Human Resources Development and DU and sought their stand on the petition which contended that the university’s selection criteria was “arbitrary and irrational”.
Six Kerala-based students said that the calculation of ‘best of four’ marks is restricted only to the subjects mentioned in the varsity prospectus —Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali and Punjabi languages.
The other languages mentioned in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution are excluded and if any other subject other than those mentioned in the prospectus is considered for calculating ‘best of four’, there is a deduction of 2.5% in the aggregate score, the petition said.
“This causes much discomfiture for those students who chose their regional language for the board exams as elective subjects and have scored high in the same,” it said.
It claimed that while most colleges consider languages like Malayalam and Tamil, which are not part of the list considered by the university for calculation of ‘ best of four’ subjects, with 2.5%deduction, some do not accept the languages at all.