Breaking: Supreme Court seeks solution from NUALS for CLAT complaints

The Supreme Court today asked National University of Advanced Legal Studies (NUALS) to come up with a “wholesome solution” to redress the complaints against Common Law Admission Test 2018 (CLAT).

The petition filed by six CLAT candidates was heard by a Bench of Justices AM Khanwilkar and Navin Sinha.

Senior Advocate V Giri along with advocate A Karthik appeared for NUALS while Senior Advocate Salman Khurshid appeared for the petitioners.

As the proceedings commenced, Justice Khanwilkar shot a question at V Giri,

“How do you resolve all these problems?”

When Giri pointed out that the “petition is filed by just seven candidates”, Justice Khanwilkar said that it is not about the petitioners alone, but involves a larger problem.

Giri submitted that wherever any complaint regarding technical glitches was made, extra time was given to the candidates.

He also handed over an audit report to the Bench. The report consisted of details of petitioner candidates relating to the exam indicating aspects like:

• time taken by the candidate to finish the exam
• number of times the candidate got logged out
• number of questions attempted and answered

Giri informed the Court that the respondents prepared the report overnight and similar details are available for all the candidates who appeared for CLAT.

While perusing this report, Justice Khanwilkar asked the respondents if they can provide for a grievance redressal forum where all these complaints can be addressed.

Giri responded by stating that it would be better if the Court decides what needs to be done instead of the respondents “running around in every High Court”.

Justice Khanwilkar proceeded to ask the Senior Counsel to seek instructions from NUALS over setting up of a redressal forum.

“See if you can talk and come up with a recommendation. We will decide on the legal points.”

Stating that NUALS too wishes for grievances to be addressed, Giri said

“We are a university. We are not in adversarial position to any student.” 

Noting that there are a number of factual aspects and complaints that need to be looked into, Justice Khanwilkar suggested that the respondents should provide a common platform or redressal forum to look into the complaints and should come up with a wholesome solution.

“Case to case questions will have to be looked into. They (Respondent Institute) can appoint some authority to look into the case to case aspects and that will ease a lot of problems”, Justice Khanwilkar said.

It, therefore, asked NUALS to make suggestions to resolve the issue and also asked Senior Counsel Giri to ascertain if a forum/ body can be set up to look into the issues raised by the candidates.

Salman Khurshid, appearing for the petitioners, requested the Court to bear in mind that a number of petitions on the same subject matter are pending before various High Courts.

The Court directed various High Courts not to proceed with similar petitions till tomorrow, when the Supreme Court will hear the matter again. It will decide tomorrow whether to transfer the petitions pending in High Courts, to itself.

CLAT 2018 was conducted by NUALS on May 13 with the aid and assistance of a private company, M/s Sify Technologies Ltd.

The petitioners have sought quashing of the same and have prayed for holding fresh examination.

It is their case that manner in which the examination was held “has jeopardized the future of thousands of students who appeared for this examination”.

They have submitted students across various States faced serious problems in almost 200 Online examination centres. The problems included power cuts, failure of log-in system, slow biometric verification, blank screens, substantial loss of time in system log-ins, frequent resetting of computer systems, hanging of computer systems, server shutdown and difficulties in moving from one question to another.

These difficulties led to significant loss of time (averaging about 5-30 minutes from student to student) which has totally vitiated the very essence of an online competitive exam of 120 minutes wherein a student is expected to answer 200 questions, the petition states.

Petitions were filed in various High Courts across the country including Punjab & Haryana High Court, Delhi High Court, Rajasthan High court, Madhya Pradesh High Court and Calcutta High Court.

The Calcutta High court had stayed the publication of results of CLAT till May 25, i.e. tomorrow.

Read Order: