No Exams In Regional Languages for IITJEE Aspirants: Madras High Court

The Madras High Court declined the proposal to direct the Centre to hold IIT Joint Engineering Examinations (JEE) in Tamil and other regional languages, saying that the issue is in the government's domain.

A PIL was filed by R Ovia in the Madras High Court to conduct the entrance exam for IITs in local languages like Kannada, Gujarati, Oriya, Assamese, Tamil and Telugu. The first bench comprising of Chief Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Justice T S Sivagnanam dismissed it, saying that the citizens of India are not supposed to be governed by the judiciary.

The IIT-JEE examinations are presently conducted in Hindi and English both. The need for multilingual question papers arose after counsel Radhakrishnan said that students from rural background suffered a handicap as most of them do their Plus Two courses in Tamil medium but are not able to appear for their IIT-JEE in that language. He said that the UPSC, railway recruitment and other national-level examinations are held in regional languages.

The Centre objected to the petition saying that the exams mentioned are for employment purposes and not education. The judiciary too supported the stance and further said that whether the entrance examination should be held in multiple languages or dual language or a single language has to be left open to the institutions conducting the examinations.