Students should not be excluded from admission on ground of delay in declaration of board exam results: Delhi High Court

The Delhi High Court recently called for better coordination between the boards conducting school exams and the counselling and entrance exam bodies of various higher education institutes so as to ensure that students are not excluded from counselling and admission because of delay in declaration of board exam results [Akshita Sehrawat (Minor) Represent By Her Father Sh. Deepak Kumar Vs Delhi Technical University (Dtu) & Ors]..Students, despite having attained good percentile and rank, should not be ousted from counselling only on the ground that results of class XII exams were not declared on time."It needs to be underlined that there has to be proper coordination between the counselling bodies and all the Boards at the national and state level, conducting class XII exams..An important aspect which cannot be overlooked is that students put hard labour for two to four years, or may be more, while preparing for JEE (Mains) and they should not get ousted from consideration in the counselling despite having attained good percentile and rank only on the ground that result of class XII has not been timely declared by the concerned education Board conducting such qualifying exam of class XII," the Bench said.Justice Vikas Mahajan made the observation while directing the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) to expedite the declaration of class XII results to enable students to participate in the counselling process for Delhi government-run higher education institutionsThe Court directed the NIOS to declare the results by June 17 to allow a two-day buffer for the candidates to apply for the counselling starting on June 19. The Court said that students cannot be held responsible for the delay in the declaration of class XII exam results. It ordered the Joint Admission Council (JAC), the body tasked with handling counselling in premier Delhi institutions offering engineering and architecture courses, to enable candidates to register for counselling even if the class XII results are not declared in time. .The order was passed on petitions filed by a bunch of candidates who cleared the JEE (Mains) 2025 and claimed eligibility to participate in the counselling process conducted by the JAC. However, they were not being allowed to participate in the counselling process because of board exam results were yet to be declared by NIOS.Class XII results serve as an eligibility criterion for candidates to register for the counselling process of JAC.The last date to register was June 2.The Court after hearing the parties provided a single-day window of June 19 to the candidates who missed the earlier opportunity.The matter will be taken up next on July 7. .Advocates Gaurav Deshraj and Naveen Kumar appeared for candidate Akshita Sehrawat. Advocates Ankit Singh Sinsinwar, Ravi Kumar, Dhananjay Kumar and Neha Yadav appeared for candidate Om Upadhyay and others.Advocates Samar K, Anmol Agarwal, P Sharma, Kushal Gupta, Abhishek Singh, Kavita Vinayak and Gaurav Vashisht appeared for candidate Aryan Verma.Advocates Soumava Karmakar and Jyoti Bajaj appeared for Union of India. Advocates S Rajappa R Gowrishankar and G Dhivyasri appeared for NIOS.Advocates Pankhuri Shrivastava and Aditya Kumar appeared for National Testing Agency (NTA).Standing Counsel Avnish Ahlawat with advocates NK Singh, Aliza Alam, Mohnish and Amitoj appeared for Delhi Technical University.Advocate Arjun Mitra appeared for JoSAA[Read Order]