HC notice to Centre,
The Delhi High Court has sought a response from the city govt on a PIL seeking quashing of nursery admission guidelines framed by it on the grounds that they violated the Right to Education Act.
A division bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justice Manmohan on Wednesday also issued notice to the Centre and asked them to file their reply within six weeks.
The PIL was filed by civil rights group Social Jurist challenging the validity of government's notification.
The NGO's lawyer Ashok Agarwal said the guidelines giving private schools a free hand to formulate their own admission criteria was against the RTE Act and Delhi High Courts previous orders.
"It is based on categorisation of children. The guidelines will lead to further commercialisation of education at the cost of hapless parents/students," the PIL said.
The lawyer argued that the High Court in September 2006 had constituted a panel of experts headed by Ashok Ganguly, Chairman CBSE to go into all the issues related to nursery admission.
It enumerated three basic principles to evolve a common admission process, transparency, elimination of interview and minimising managements discretion.
The PIL also said the panel had formulated a 100-point scale with emphasis on uniform admission procedure for all schools.
"The only agreeable point was 25 percent reservation for children from economically weaker sections but the permission to schools to formulate their own policy to fill the remaining 75 percent seats could not be allowed," as per the petition.
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