The Delhi High Court on Monday sought response from the Delhi University on a petition by two young artists challenging its decision to scrap the extracurricular activities (ECA) category quota for art and culture from the academic year 2020-21.
The court asked the varsity to reply to the petition filed jointly by Hritika Aneesh and Gokul C.R., both seeking admission in undergraduate courses, and posted it for further hearing on July 22.
The petition filed by advocate Manoj V. George has urged for a direction to the university not to discontinue admission based on 14 categories of the ECA in undergraduate courses.
Delhi University, till the last year, was admitting students under the ECA category and about 15% of the grace marks were provided for the students who qualified from the category.
However, Mr. George said that the university has recently announced that the entire ECA category for art and cultural forms have been discarded as the trials could not be conducted due to COVID-19 pandemic.
He argued that the university, while giving credit for ECA, has only included National Cadet Corp (NCC), National Service Scheme (NSS) and sports category and all other categories of extracurricular troupe have been “arbitrarily ignored”.
“This exclusion of a particular category of students in Art and Culture will actually result in absolute injustice to the students and entire group of art and culture [ECA]. Eligible students will be wiped off from the university system for an entire year for no fault of theirs, and the same per se violates Article 14 of the Constitution,” the petition said.
The plea stated that the two young artists have completed their Class 12 board examinations and have more than a decade of training in Bharatanatyam, Mohiniyattam and Kathakali, which are recognised traditional art forms practised in the country.
They asked for an order to the university to organise the trials of candidates under all ECA categories on virtual platforms. “If necessary, call students after uploading videos of performances in small batches for trials after maintaining social distancing and ensuring COVID-19 guidelines issued by the government,” the plea said.
They also asked for the university to carry out decentralised verifications through the colleges to conduct their own trials while maintaining social distancing.
The plea said students “similarly placed” like them have been undergoing training for many years in their school programmes with the legitimate expectation that they would be able to score certain extra percentage of marks while seeking admission in the university.
They said that the university’s decision has affected more than 1,000 students.
