In a move that clears the way for admissions to the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology, the Supreme Court today vacated its stay on counselling and admission to IITs and other institutions related to JEE (Advanced) entrance examination.
The bench, headed by Justice Dipak Misra, while vacating the stay, said that no High Court will entertain any plea on this issue.
"We are inclined to vacate the order passed on July 7 and also convey that we are not inclined to interfere with the counselling and admission process, and high courts should act accordingly and not interfere in the admission process," the court said in its order.
The apex court also said that it desires that errors, mistakes in the framing of questions and in printing of question papers should not happen and asked the IITs to furnish and undertaking that such errors will not recur and that no situation to award bonus marks will arise. Representing the IITs, Attorney General KK Venugopal assured the court that such a situation will not arise in the future.
On July 7, the apex court had restrained the IITs across the country from conducting counselling or admitting students subsequent to the Joint Entrance Examination this year. The court also sought details of the petitions pending before High Courts and the number of petitions challenging the IIT- JEE 2017 rank list, and award of additional marks to all candidates who had appeared in the test.
On June 30, the Supreme Court had sought the Centre's response to a petition challenging the grant of seven extra marks to all candidates who appeared in the IIT-Joint Entrance examination (IIT-JEE) for advance course. The petition, filed by IIT aspirant Aishwarya Agarwal, had sought the court's direction to declare that the action of awarding "bonus marks" to the candidates who had appeared in the JEE (Advanced) 2017 examination was wrong and violated her right, as well as that of other students.
The petitioner said the institution should conduct fresh examination and prepare a fresh merit list or grant all students another opportunity to appear in the examination to be conducted next year, while also seeking an interim stay on the merit list and the counselling, saying it would cause serious prejudice to the petitioner and other deserving candidates.
The extra marks were granted in the wake of a printing error in a Hindi language paper.
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