The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to interfere with the decision of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to re-conduct the Class 12 Economics examination following incidents of paper leak.
A bench of Justices SA Bobde and lN Rao even turned down the request for an independent probe into the leakage claiming this was not the job of the court.
A set of four petitions were taken up by the apex court challenging the CBSE's decision to conduct re-test into the Mathematics paper of Class 10 conducted on March 28 and the Economics paper of Class 12 held on March 26.
With the CBSE on April 3 scrapping its own decision to conduct re-test of Class 10 Mathematics paper, some of the petitioners withdrew the petition. But with the re-test on Class 12 Economics paper still on, several affected petitioners urged the Court to hear their petitions. Close to five lakh students had taken this exam.
The bench said, "This is not part of our jurisdiction to see whether papers are getting leaked. Are you suggesting that in a writ petition we will examine the impact of the leakIJ These decisions have to be left to the discretion of the authorities concerned.”
Certain petitioners raised doubts over the conflicting statements emerging from the Board which initially denied about the leak but later admitted to the extent that the impact of the leak was restricted to Delhi-NCR and Haryana. However, as reports later emerged, petitioners submitted that incidents of leak began to emerge from Bihar and Jharkhand. They demanded an independent probe into the extent of leak to ascertain whether such a re-test on the national scale was at all needed.
The bench shot back, “By seeking an investigation what interest do you have in this examinationIJ Do you want to suggest that the CBSE is not speaking the truthIJ" Finding no merit to entertain the bunch of petitions, the court dismissed them cautioning the lawyers that if they argued any further, cost will be imposed upon them.