DU’s responsibility to provide scribes to visually impaired students, says high court

The Delhi high court on Thursday pulled up Delhi University (DU) for its lack of preparedness in providing scribes to visually impaired students and said it is the

The Delhi high court on Thursday pulled up Delhi University (DU) for its lack of preparedness in providing scribes to visually impaired students and said it is the responsibility of the varsity to provide scribes to such students. The court also observed that of the 1.82 lakh final-year students, who registered on the university portal for the first phase of the mock test that started on July 27, only 22,372 completed the entire exam process.

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DU is holding online exams in the open-book format (OBE) for final-year undergraduate and postgraduate students as a one-time measure amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite opposition from both students and teachers, DU has scheduled the online exams between August 10 and August 31.

In OBE format, students have to download the question paper from an online portal and once they are done taking the exam, the answer sheets have to be scanned and uploaded. The university gives each student three hours for the entire process.

A bench of justice Hima Kohli and justice Subramonium Prasad expressed its displeasure over the abysmally low number of students being able to complete the exam during mock tests and said it was “not comfortable with this figure”.

The court’s remarks came while hearing pleas by law student Prateek Sharma and National Federation of Blind (NFB) seeking to set up effective mechanisms for visually impaired and specially abled students.

On Thursday, DU filed an affidavit stating that 182,237 students had registered for online exams of whom 70,101 had logged in for the first phase of mock tests which started from July 27. DU said 39,159 students attempted the exams and only 22,372 could submit their answer sheets.

With respect to persons with disability (PwD), the varsity told the court that 834 such students had registered for the OBE and only 142 could complete the exam process.

Appearing for DU, senior counsel Sachin Datta, told the court that the mock test was conducted to familiarise the students with the online exam process and that they had given different subject papers to students. He said students may have got question papers that were not of their subject and hence they could not complete the exam.

To this, the court said, “Why would you think that students would be able to answer something which is not of his/her subject?”.

Senior advocate SK Rungta, appearing for NFB, told the court that several students could not take the exams for want of a scribe. He said 60 students had given a request to the varsity to provide them scribes -- 58 wanted the scribe at home, while two wanted them at the CSC (common service centre).

The DU counsel told the court that they can only provide scribes at the CSC and not at home. The court said there was a “complete mismatch of information” after it was informed by the CSC director that they would only facilitate exams and would not have anything to do with scribes.

“Look at the plight of the student. Several students are sitting outside Delhi. Let’s not forget that even if the metropolitan cities might have facilities, the other remote areas would not have proper connectivity. The paltry number of students having completed the exams against those registered raises some curiosity (sic),” the court said. The matter will next be heard on August 5.