The Supreme Court's next hearing regarding the plea filed by Yuva Sena and Maharashtra Tourism Minister Aaditya Thackeray, challenging the University Grants Commission's (UGC) revised guidelines on conducting final year exams in September despite the COVID-19 crisis, will be on July 31.
Yuva Sena Secretary Varun Sardesai took to Twitter and said, "Yuva Sena has been garnering support from across the nation with students, teachers, Education staff and associations sending in letters of support to us!! Thank you to everyone!!"
Aaditya Thackeray, who heads the Yuva Sena, had earlier prayed that each university be allowed to chart out its own plan of action with respect to the terminal semester/final year examinations depending on the local conditions in their respective states to provide relief to students.
After filing the petition, Thackeray had said that it was for each and every student across the country, who was being forced to appear for an examination in an "absolutely bizarre judgement" of the situation by the UGC.
''A humble prayer has been made to save lives of lakhs of students, teachers, non-teaching staff and their families by asking UGC to not to be stubborn about enforcing examinations. We believe that academic excellence can't be judged by one examination and for academic excellence, we must calculate the aggregate marks of the past semesters,'' he said in a tweet.
The Disaster Management Committee chaired by Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray has also reiterated its decision to cancel the final year examinations because of the pandemic. Minister of Higher and Technical Education Uday Samant has urged the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development and UGC not to make the final year examinations an ego issue.
Meanwhile, Maharashtra's COVID-19 figures are: Positive cases 3,75,799; deaths 13,656; recoveries 2,13,238; active cases 1,48,601; people tested so far 18,86,296.
