Non-obedience of nursery order; HC's contempt notice to govt

The court had in its earlier orders of February and April 2014 as well as a judgement directed the DoE to issue a circular to 43 schools, which have been mentioned in the petition as being capable of handling CWSN, to keep aside some seats in nursery admissions for differently-abled children.

On May 7, the court had directed the DoE to issue the circular to 15 schools, to set aside 2 seats each for CWSN, as according to a DoE inspection they were found to have the necessary facilities to handle differently abled kids.  As no circular was issued, a contempt plea was moved by Arora and the court had on May 13 summoned the Principal Secretary of Education to appear before it today.  Meanwhile, the court termed as “delayed” the review petition moved by DoE seeking recall of directions issued to it regarding admission of differently-abled children in the 43 schools.

“Your review petition is delayed. There is no reason for us to entertain it,” the bench said.

Earlier, the DoE had filed a status report saying that pursuant to its inspection, it has been found that 18 out of the 44 schools mentioned in the main petition have the facility to cater to children with special needs (CWSN) while 19 others lacked the same.

It had also submitted it is yet to inspect eight other schools to ascertain whether they can handle these children or not. The petitioner had also submitted a list of seven other schools which can handle CWSN. Taking note of the list of schools, the court had asked the DoE to issue a circular to the 15 schools to keep aside at least 2 seats for CWSN.  The court had also issued notice to rest of the 19 schools, which, as per the DoE, did not have the facility to handle CWSN and asked them to respond as to whether they were willing to admit such children.

Earlier, the court had held the Lt Governor's nursery admission guidelines were illegal to the extent it bracketed children with special needs with economically weaker section (EWS) and other disadvantaged groups.