DU OBEs: Students protest outside ministry building as Delhi High Court adjourns hearing till August 4

new delhi: The Delhi High Court on Friday adjourned the hearing in a batch of petitions challenging the Delhi University's online open-book examinations (OBEs) to August 4 after issuing directions to the University Grants Commission to file a counter with respect to the mode of examination, format, timings and other details in these petitions.

Justice Pratibha M Singh also noted that counter-affidavits in these petitions had not been filed and pointed out that the UGC cannot be answerable for glitches in the online exam infrastructure. These directions came after it was submitted by the Delhi University counsel that UGC must take a stand on evaluating students on the basis of previous examinations and internal assessment.

However, when the UGC submitted that it would need time to file the affidavits as thousands of colleges would need to be contacted, the court suggested that there were already various colleges that had evaluated students this way.

To this, UGC's counsel said these colleges were "wrong" and an irked Justice Singh asked whether IITs and IIMs which had already devised alternative evaluation methods, were lesser institutions.

Meanwhile, DU students on Friday protested against the OBEs outside the Education Ministry office. Students who were part of the protest said they were manhandled by the police who were on duty, while a journalist working with a Hindi online portal was also purportedly briefly

detained.

"When we were protesting at MHRD we were manhandled and abused by the police. They also detained a journalist who was covering the protest," Student Federation of India (SFI) DU president Sumit told Millennium Post.

When the newspaper contacted Sansad Marg Police Station, where the journalist was detained, the station house officer said there was no one with them. The journalist, however, said that he was kept at the station for three hours.