New Delhi:
The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to entertain a PIL seeking stay on tomorrow's declaration of results of the prestigious IIT Joint Entrance Examination for 2010-11 and the slammed the petitioner NGO Satya Foundation for its "publicity stunt."
Questioning the locus standi and the intention of the petitioner, the apex court queried, "Did you ever bother to take up the cause of those killed in Dantewada (75 CRPF personnel) or those who lost their lives in the recent natural calamities."
The PIL had sought stay of the results on the ground that there were several errors in the instructions attached to the question paper and faulty marking system which it claimed undermined the prospects of over 3000 students.
A vacation bench of Justices G S Singhvi and C K Prasad, while dismissing the PIL, cautioned that any such stay would affect the career of over four lakh students and might lead to serious consequences including suicides by the aspirants.
The bench rebuked Chetan Upadhyaya, secretary of the association and said it would have imposed a huge cost on the petitioner but was refraining from doing so as he was a young man and appeared to have been misguided.
"Some students will even commit suicide. Who will be responsible for it if we stay the results? There are three types of PILs--Public Interest Litigation, Private Interest Litigation and Publicity Interest Litigation. This petition has been filed as a publicity stunt," the bench observed.
The apex court said it was convinced that the petitioner has no locus standi and justification to meddle with the declaration of the results.
"Ordinarily we would have saddled the petitioner with a five figure amount. But keeping in view the fact that he is young and seems to have been misguided, we refrain from doing so," the bench observed while dismissing the appeal.
Senior counsel R Venkatramani appeared for the Union Government. The Delhi High Court had earlier on May 19 dismissed the NGO's plea for staying the result but kept the petition pending with a direction to the IIT's organising committee for JEE to demonstrate before it on June 2 the software adopted for evaluation of answer sheets.
The High Court had also sought an affidavit from the committee about the corrective measures taken by it to protect the IIT-JEE aspirants from any disadvantage.
Even as the high court was seized of the matter, the NGO sought to approach the apex court for stay of the results scheduled for Wednesday, which evoked the bench's ire and rebuff.