HC urges varsity to fit in law students

MUMBAI, JAN 25: The Bombay High Court today asked the University of Mumbai to explore possibilities of accommodating some law students wh...

MUMBAI, JAN 25: The Bombay High Court today asked the University of Mumbai to explore possibilities of accommodating some law students who stand to lose an academic year because their re-evaluation results were out in January this year.

In order to help them with their studies, a division bench of Acting Chief Justice Ashok Agarwal and Justice A P Shah accepted their counsel8217;s suggestion and ordered that a list of advocates willing to teach them be submitted to the court and to the university.

Padmaj Dilip Sheth, Kalpesh Joshi, Anita Srivastava and Ranjit Singh Jadhavrao 8211; all students of the Government Law College 8211; moved court when they were refused admissions for the current academic year because the results of some of their papers submitted for re-evaluation in August 1998 came in only in January 1999.

Arguing that the students cannot be made to suffer because of the University8217;s delay, counsel for the petitioners Harish Jagtiani said that while the University is bound to declare the regularresults in 45 days there was no such time period for the re-evaluation results. 8220;This does not give the University a license to sit on the results for four months,8221; he argued.

Counsel for the University, R A Rodrigues quoted the University laws and argued that re-evaluation was only a facility made available to the students and could not be used as a privilege by them. 8220;The delay in results do not confer any rights on them for their admission to the higher classes,8221; he said.

Jagtiani replied that it was not a mere facility because the declaration that students sign while giving their papers for revaluation said that they were bound to the reversal of assessment marks, if any, occurred. According to the University laws, only if the marks showed a 10 per cent improvement or a reduction over the earlier marks would it be admitted in the marksheets. All the students in this case had obtained a 10 per cent reversal in their marks.

Justice A P Shah enquired if there was any method whereby the studentscould be compensated in their studies for the term they have lost. To this, Jagtiani said that he had a list of advocates who were willing to teach these students. The bench accepted his suggestion and ordered that the list be drawn up and submitted to the University as well as to the court on Friday when the matter comes up next.

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Rodrigues suggested that some sort of a guarantee be taken from the advocates because the last time a similar list was drawn up in 1996 to help another batch of students, none of the advocates turned up.