Delhi Education Minister Manish Sisodia has batted for the deferment of grade 12th CBSE examination until all the students appearing are vaccinated on priority basis. ‘No examination should be held until vaccination,’ Mr Sisodia, who is also the Deputy CM of Delhi, said, adding: “The Delhi government has proposed to Centre to conduct the exams only after 1.4 crore students and teachers concerned get vaccinated.’
His comments come a day after the Centre and the most states agreed to go ahead with the CBSE exams during a virtual meeting of Defence Minister Rajnath Singh with the state governments. Union Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank and other Union ministers, including Smriti Irani, were present at the meeting.
The CBSE had proposed two options to the Centre for evaluation of the students’ performance– either holding exams only for 19 major subjects of the 174 offered by the board– or reducing the duration of exams to one-and-a half-hours instead of three hours.
The proposals were deliberated upon in the meeting. However, Mr Singh has granted three more days to the states to submit their feedback by May 25, based on which a final decision will be announced by June 1. Expressing his reservations on the proposal of offline conduct of the exams, Mr Sisodia said both the options are likely to expose the students to the virus, adding that the method being followed to evaluate the performance of tenth grade students should be adopted for grade 12th as well.
On Saturday, the Delhi Education Minister had interacted with government and private school teachers regarding the matter and most of the them he said, were in favour of cancelling the exams. A section of parents has demanded cancellation of the exams in view of the pandemic and moved the Supreme Court for calling it off.
