"Travesty Of Justice": Supreme Court, Opening IIT Gates To Dalit Boy
NDTV
The judges said today that it would be a "travesty of justice" if he was denied admission and failed to receive help from the nation's highest court of law.
A 17-year-old Dalit student who was about to lose his seat at the country's premier Indian Institute of Technology, or IIT, got relief from the Supreme Court today. Prince Jaibeer Singh was earlier turned away by the Bombay High Court. But the judges said today that it would be a "travesty of justice" if he was denied admission and failed to receive help from the nation's highest court of law.
Prince, a resident of Uttar Pradesh's Allahabad, got selected for civil engineering branch at the IIT's Bombay campus on October 27. But he was unable to pay the acceptance fee of Rs 15,000 -- the initial amount to be paid online in order to secure the seat.
Initially, he fell short of money. But when he was able to arrange for it with some help from his sister, he was stymied by technical glitches on the website.
"There was some difficulty in gathering funds, but my sister helped us," said the teen, who has three elder sisters. "Then I tried paying the fees but there were technical glitches... I even went all the way to IIT Kharagpur (which was conducting the counselling for the seats) so that I could pay the fees," he said.
