The Madras high court on Monday postponed the judgement to June 11, regarding conducting of 10th board exams on June 15 onwards.
Chennai: The Madras high court on Monday postponed the judgement to June 11 regarding the conduct of Std 10 board exams from June 15.
A division bench comprising Justice Vineet Kothari and Justice R Suresh Kumar restrained itself from passing any interim order and adjourned hearing to 2.30pm today.
While a verdict was expected today, the bench postponed the hearing to June 11 and rightly put forth that it cannot allow the state to put the lives of more than nine lakh students at stake.
"This is not like opening TASMAC shops during lockdown", the Justice observed. The Court also questioned if the Tamil Nadu government can give an undertaking that no student will be infected by the virus if it is allowed to conduct Class X board exams from June 15.
The bench made the observations while hearing the plea moved by the Tamil Nadu High and Higher Secondary School Graduate Teachers Association challenging the state's decision to conduct the exams from June 15.
The Association pleaded to postpone the exams by at least 2 months. Meanwhile, the state prosecutor argued that there could be no better time than this to conduct the exams as going forward in October and November, the positive COVID cases could increase to 10 lakhs and they might not be able to conduct the exams at all.
According to the petitioner, there will be a total of 12,690 examination centres for class 10 and 7,400 centres for class 11 with the involvement of over 2.3 lakh invigilators. It may be recalled that all opposition parties and a majority of students and parents have demanded cancellation of the board exams.