Admission row: SC asks IIT prof to seek HC relief

A bench of Justices G S Singhvi and H L Dattu allowed the appeal filed by Prof Rajeev Kumar against the decision of the Delhi High Court.

The high court had in its order on June 2, last year, said Kumar did not have the locus standi to challenge the validity of JEE and dismissed his public interest litigation.

Kumar, then working as professor of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Kharagpur, had sought a probe by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) into alleged “irregularities, tampering and fraud” in the conduct of JEE.

He also sought direction for appointment of a committee of experts to prescribe a rotational system for determination of cut-off marks for each subjects.

The high court, however, dismissed his plea referring the decision of the apex court in another case in which a similar PIL filed a journalist was dismissed.

Allowing the appeal filed by Kumar, the apex court bench said, the high court “gravely erred” in relying upon the order passed by the apex court in the case of Chetan Upadhyay, who claimed to be a journalist, as it did not have any bearing on the appellant’s right to question the legality of the JEE.

“In our view, the high court was not justified in non-suiting the appellant on the ground of lack of locus without even adverting to the averments made by him that he was a professor in the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, that his son and daughter had appeared in the JEE conducted in 2006 and 2010, respectively, and that he was interested in ensuring that the Joint Entrance Examinations (JEE) is conducted in a transparent and fair manner so that meritorious students may not suffer,” the bench said.
The court remitted back the matter to the high court for deciding the petition on merit.