Chennai: The Madras High Court on Tuesday admitted and ordered notice on a PIL from a service organisation and also a legislator of the ruling DMK, seeking to declare unconstitutional Sec. 57 of the Constitution (the 42nd Amendment) Act 1976, insofar as it took away the field of education from the State List to the Concurrent List of the Union government.
After impleading the Tamil Nadu government as a party-respondent in the case by itself, the first bench of Chief Justice Sanjib Banerjee and Justice P D Audikesavalu ordered the notice, returnable in eight weeks, to the state and central governments. The matter will be taken up for hearing after 10 weeks, the bench said.
In his PIL, DMK MLA Dr N Ezhilan, a medical practitioner and a trustee of the 'Aram Seyya Virumbu Trust', challenged Sec. 57 of the Constitution (the 42nd Amendment) Act to the extent it deleted Entry 11 from List II and transferred the subject contained in the said Entry from the State list to the Concurrent list as part of Entry 25, as violative of the federal structure.
He submitted that the reason behind giving exclusive authority to the States on the subject of "Education" was driven by the fact that it is the State which knows the individual needs and aspirations of the people in different areas/localities and is better placed to address the gaps in the system and formulate policies that are tailor-made to suit their needs.
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