The Secondary School Certificate (SSC) examinations have been postponed and the new dates would be announced later.
The exams were supposed to start from June 8 as per the revised schedule after they were postponed in March when the lockdown was announced. However, even the fresh schedule was contested in the High Court, which allowed the government to conduct the same in the districts leaving aside the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) area.
However, the government decided to postpone the exams altogether to avoid confusion. It believes that lot of students have migrated to their home towns and villages after the lockdown and conducting the exams in two phases would only confuse students apart from the logistics, paper-setting and announcement of results.
“We will announce the dates once Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao reviews,” a senior official said adding that conducting the exams in two different phases would put a huge burden on the administration. “Parents and students too won’t approve if the exams were not conducted simultaneously across the State.”
Exams were originally scheduled to be held from March 19 to April 6. As the situation was getting grim with the spread of COVID-19 and parents expressing apprehensions over the safety of children, the High Court directed the government to postpone the exams.
Three papers - First Language paper-I, First Language Paper-II and Second Language papers were already conducted by then and the remaining exams were postponed.
As the lockdown restrictions were eased, the government on the direction of the HC again issued fresh dates for the remaining exams from June 8 to July 5. As per the court orders the government increased the exam centres to maintain social distance and other safety measures.
Earlier in the day, Telangana High Court had directed government to postpone rescheduled SSC examinations beginning Monday in GHMC area but conduct them in other parts of the State. The court also made it clear that the exams should be postponed in areas where there is sudden spurt in COVID cases
A bench of Chief Justice Raghvendra Singh and Justice B. Vijaysen Reddy, after hearing a PIL plea, seeking further deferment of the rescheduled SSC exams, rejected the government’s resolve to conduct the exams all over the State.
Before the hearing began, Advocate General B.S. Prasad told the court that government has decided to treat those who write supplementary exams scheduled for August or September would be treated as “regular” students.
Observing that nothing can be more important than the lives of students, who would be vulnerable to coronavirus while appearing for exams, the CJ said that “where there is a will, there is a way” referring to conducting supplementary exams. When the AG said the government decided to treat supplementary candidates as regular since it was concerned with the future of students, the CJ observed it was not showing similar concern about the likelihood of a student contracting the virus and dying of it. (With inputs from Legal Correspondent Marri Ramu)