The Gujarat high court has recently issued a notice to the state government over petitions filed by parents from Vadodara challenging the government’s insistence to implement the mandatory 6-year age rule for admission to Class 1 from the next academic year.
Around 55 parents approached the high court seeking either postponement of the implementation of rules in the Right to Education Act insisting that a child shouldn’t be admitted to the primary section if he has not attained 6 years of age on June 1, 2023, or to grant relaxation in the age limit and extend it till December 31, 2023. The petitioners submitted that their children fall short of 1 day to 6 months in attaining the age limit on June 1.
Therefore, some of the parents approached the HC where a couple of months ago with the same issue, but the HC asked to make a representation to the education authorities. Their lawyers Ashish Dagli and Hitesh Gupta informed the HC that their requests remained unheeded and hence the court moved again.
The lawyers submitted that the following requests made for postponement of the deadline or the cut-off dates state like Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Karnataka, Kerala, and Jammu region have decided to grant a relaxation in the age limit so that no child has to repeat a year in a pre-primary section.
Therefore, the Gujarat government should also be directed to act on these lines, or nearly 3 lakh children will have to spend 1 more year in the pre-primary section. The lawyers argued that the state government has ignored the fact that due to the repetition of 1 year, these children would be more than 18 years and 6 months after Class 12.
This would make them ineligible for admission to the National Defence Academy as the cut-off age to NDA is 18 years & 7 months.
It was contended that the government authorities didn’t give due publicity to the notifications issued in the year 2020, and many schools didn’t know about it when they admitted kids to pre-primary sections. They urged the HC to direct the government to keep the notifications in abeyance and to implement in from 2025. The petitioners have requested directions to frame a fresh resolution according to the New Education Policy, 2020 guidelines.
The state government opposed petitions and questioned their maintainability. The 6-month relaxation in age limit, which is being asked for now, was granted last year. After the preliminary hearing, Justice Sangeeta Vishen issued notices to the state government, the secretary of the primary education department, the Vadodara district primary education officer, and the schools concerned asking them to give a reply on the subject by April 24. The court refused to stay the government’s decision.
