HC exempts non-Tamil students from Tamil langugae paper

The Madras High Court today exempted all class X students having mother tongue other than Tamil from writing Part I Tamil language during the board exam commencing tomorrow provided they had sought the relief from authorities concerned.
The First Bench, comprising Chief Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Justice M M Sundresh, granted the exemption while passing orders on a batch of petitions from Guru Dhornacharya School of Excellence in Krishnagiri district and others.
The matter relates to a government rule making it compulsory for class X students to write Tamil examination from this year.
The petitioners sought a direction to the state School Education authorities to exempt the students, belonging to other states and having different mother tongues, from writing the Tamil language exam and instead to write the exam in their respective mother tongue languages.

The bench noted that the students had applied for exemption well in time. However, the delay was on the part of the respective schools. The delay was also meagre ranging to a maximum of 10 days. The state was also affected by the floods and this had created some functional problems.
"We believe that the fate of the students should not be affected by some delay in forwarding of the applications by the institutions, if they are otherwise eligible, which is the position in case of all these candidates," the bench said and pointed out that it had granted such exemption on earlier occasions also.

"We, thus, allow all these writ petitions and exempt them from taking the Tamil exam on parity with the order passed by us on the earlier occasion," the bench said.
To prevent any unnecessary harassment to other students, who are similarly placed but may not have been able to approach this court, so long as they approached the Directorate of Government Exams., today by 5 p.M., the benefit would be extended to them, too, the bench said.