SC notice to HRD ministry, IITs on JEE irregularities
NEW DELHI: Admitting a Special Leave Petition seeking reforms in the Joint Entrance Examination conducted for admission to 15 IITs and other institutes, Supreme Court on Tuesday issued notice to HRD ministry, IIT Council -- the apex body managing IITs -- and Joint Admission Board, which conducts IIT-JEE, for alleged irregularities and largescale bungling in the exam.
The SLP, filed by IIT-Kharagpur professor Rajeev Kumar, challenged the June 2010 order of Delhi High Court which had dismissed a PIL by Kumar on the ground that he had no locus standi to challenge the validity of JEE. The SLP sought directions from the apex court for comprehensive reforms in the conduct of JEE to enhance transparency and accountability.
The petition requested the SC to make specific directions for probe by a Special Investigation Team (SIT) into irregularities, tampering, fraud and abuse in the conduct of JEEs. It also sought constitution of a committee of independent experts to formulate a single examination for entrance to engineering institutions rather than having a committee of four IIT directors.
The petition said JAB should be asked to release model answers immediately after the examination was over. It sought additional safeguards to prevent tampering of the optical response sheets, not to repeat same set of persons as question setters or JEE administrators for more then two years and also to ensure strict vigilance, publish status of vacant seats and filled-in seats on day-to-day basis during admission counselling, set conceptual & analytical questions, and evaluation based on differential grading in lieu of binary grading.
Arguing on behalf of the petitioner, senior counsel Prashant Bhushan told the apex court that the PIL in Delhi HC was a comprehensive one based on extensive research and analysis of past five years' JEE data by Kumar. The data, Bhushan said, was otherwise kept secret by IITs. The data came to light as under RTI Act, IITs were forced to reveal various aspects of JEE results. In fact, many queries under RTI were answered only after the Central Information Commission passed strict orders.
Bhushan also said Kumar had established many irregularities and discrepancies which had come into the IIT-JEE examination system in the past 50 years but were kept a secret. It was also argued that detailed analysis of previous JEE data had revealed many discrepancies and irregularities, like ad hocism in cut-off determination, unattended errors in question settings/evaluation, tampering/shredding of optical response sheet in undue haste, promoting coaching institutes, lacking transparency and accountability, selecting IIT administrators' wards in some IITs, closed admission counselling resulting in irregularities in admissions and seats lying vacant, zero accountability for attending to apparent errors and poor ethics in JEE administration.
The petitioner also pointed out that JEE 2010 was marred by different kinds of errors in question papers, like ambiguous instructions, wrongly printed instructions, mismatch of subject headings in question papers and optical response sheet and printing errors.
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