GATE Exam 2022: The Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed to hear the plea seeking the postponement of the Graduate Qualifying Examination in Engineering, 2022 (GATE 2022) given the third wave of COVID-19. Earlier, more than 23,000 candidates taking the GATE exam in February joined a petition calling for the exam to be postponed.
This year, the exam is organized by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur from 4th to 13th February. “With the current third wave, Covid-19 due to its new variant Omicron has spread severely in several states, cities. Several studies including one carried out by IIT Kanpur predict that the peak of the 3rd wave is expected in early February and that the wave will end in April. Therefore, the spike will most likely coincide with GATE’s regular review dates,” the petition reads.
“If exam dates are not rescheduled, candidates appearing for GATE 2022 are at imminent risk of becoming infected and spreading it, thereby putting their lives and the lives of their family members at risk,” he said. he added.
A bench of India’s Chief Justice NV Ramana, Justices AS Bopanna and Hima Kohli will list the case to be heard after Barrister Pallav Mongia, appearing for the petitioners, mentioned the matter for an urgent court hearing. case.
Two petitions are filed in the issue – one by students/candidates sitting for the GATE 2022 exam – and another is a PIL on behalf of Umesh Dhande who runs an education institute that mentors students for the GATE and other exams.
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“The country is currently suffering from a ‘third wave’ of rising COVID cases with several daily cases reaching a record high of 3 lakh and above. In this frightening situation that has engulfed the whole country, the petitioners are forced to physically enter the GATE 2022, which poses a huge health risk to the lives of many aspirants like the petitioners,” the pleas read.
The applicants also challenged the instructions of January 15, 2022 issued by the Center in which instructions to candidates taking the examination were notified. The pleas indicated that the notification/instructions to applicants were attached to the admission cards.
The petitioners, while stating that more than 9 lakh students are taking the exam in 200 exam centers, said that no guidelines have been issued or no procedures have been established to assess the state of health of students taking the exam.
“The instructions issued also lack clarity, create confusion among students as they create an unnecessary classification between students who will be allowed to take the exam and those who would be excluded without medical or legal basis. The instructions allow asymptomatic students who show symptoms to take the exam, but not students who test positive but are asymptomatic. There is no intelligible difference in such classification by the defendants as instructed and hence it is contrary to Article 14 of the Constitution of India,” the pleas said.
It’s pertinent to point out that the instructions urge students who might be showing symptoms of COVID-19 not to get tested for COVID because testing positive will prevent them from taking the exam, the pleas added.
He added that on the contrary, the instructions allow students who are
showing symptoms to appear for examination but have not tested positive for Covid. The pleas said: “This classification is absurd and contradictory, and goes against the government’s resolve to test as many people as possible for proper tracing and treatment.”
The petitioners also said that many states have already postponed some of their exams scheduled for January and February 2022, in light of the third wave that has hit the country.
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