New Delhi: Child rights activist Anubha Srivastava Sahai, on behalf of students from different states, has moved the Supreme Court against conducting offline board examinations for Class X and XII, seeking an alternate mode of assessment for the same in view of the continuing pandemic.
"Students in all the states are very worried about conducting the 10th and 12th board examination due to high rate of growth of covid-19 cases in all over the country along with the high possibility of the third wave which will affect the students very badly and also due to incomplete and of course in this pandemic situation. In most of the states during the lockdown period of June-December,2020 no classes were provided to students. Almost 98% of colleges/schools of all the states had not conducted any online exam class for students in that period.
Looking into the matter most of the state governments and education departments had declared for 100 days offline class for students and will conduct exams after 100 days of offline classes. The government said the students have to bring 'No objection certificate' signed by parents to join offline classes but most of the parents are unable to allow their child for offline classes in the pandemic," contends Sahai.
The plea says that though education is important, the lives and mental health of children, teachers, parents, etc is more important which will be impacted if they attend offline exams. And because the cases are increasing every day and experts are predicting that children will be impacted this time, it would be against children's "Right to life" if they are asked to appear for offline exams. It seeks directions from the state boards, CBSE, ICSE to come up with a different mechanism to assess the students' performance.
Recently a case seeking postponement of the GATE exam by a month had come up before the top court which the court had dismissed saying that now the situation is better, things are opening up and there is no guarantee that things would be any better in the future. The court also will be resuming its physical hearings for three days a week from the upcoming week.
