The Supreme Court on Friday allowed several Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) aspirants who have complaints about the exam to approach the Grievance Redressal Committee headed by a former Chief Justice of India within the next three days.
“We are of the view that ends of justice be served in giving liberty to the petitioners to submit a representation to the Grievance Redressal Committee with regard to their grievance within three days from today. We order accordingly. We have no doubt that the petitioners’ representation will be considered by the committee at an early date”, a Bench led by Justice Ashok Bhushan recorded in its order.
The court did not, meanwhile, interfere or stay the counselling or admission process. It said counselling had started and a large number of candidates have completed theirs.
The petitioner-aspirants, represented by senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan, alleged that the CLAT and evaluation was “erroneous, faulty, defective, discriminatory and violative of fundamental rights of the Constitution”.
The petition had been filed by several students from across the country led by Uttar Pradesh-based Lavanya Bhatt. They urged the apex court to quash the exam and order it to be re-conducted.
Plea for panel
The plea further asked the court to direct the consortium to set up a high-powered committee to examine the numerous complaints about “software glitches” and mismatched questions and answers so that students are not put in a dilemma. The petition said a foolproof mechanism should be built to avoid these problems in the future.
The online CLAT 2020 was conducted on September 28. The complaints about the exam included results displaying answers different from the ones ticked; results displaying or calculating marks for questions that were not even attempted by the candidates; 10 wrong questions followed by erroneous answers, etc.
The petition also complained about the “unreasonable lengthy design of the CLAT examination”.
Over 75,000 candidates had applied for CLAT, while 68,833 downloaded the admit cards. Over 86% took the exam across 300 centres, the petition mentioned.
