Storm in DU as students wield RTI

New Delhi: Does a student have the right to check how his answer sheets have been evaluated in an examination or who evaluated it?

That's the question haunting the academic fraternity in the national capital for the past week after as many as 300 Delhi University students filed applications under the Right To Information (RTI) Act, demanding to see copies of their answer sheets, tabulation sheets and seeking to know the breakup for evaluation of papers and also names of the evaluators.

Since its enactment last year, the Right To Information (RTI) Act has been a celebrated piece of legal instrument for the civil society and the political machinery.

So much so, that last month when certain amendments were sought to be brought in to the Act to keep file notings out of its purview, both civil society and Opposition parties mounted a unified protest to throttle the bid.

But in the sphere of education, the RTI Act seems to have posed the biggest challenge with the students suddenly discovering a critical tool to take on the academic authorities head on.

Last month, a group of aggrieved UPSC candidates took the same route to ask the authorities to share information on the cut-off marks, model answers and individual marks pertaining to the Civil Services (Preliminary) Examination 2006 -- things that have always formed a crucial secret of the entire process.

The students, who said they represented a forum called Transparency Seekers, were however denied those details. The commission said the information sought through the RTI applications formed part of their crucial secrets and intellectual property (as per provisions of Section 8 of the RTI Act) and, as such, the information did not serve any public interest.

The UPSC also said that the Civil Services (Preliminary) Examination was only a screening test and no marksheet is supplied to any candidate and, hence, it was not constrained to share the information sought. The aggrieved students then filed an appeal with the appellate authority in the commission and even met the Chief Information Commissioner, challenging the UPSC decision.

While this matter is still pending a final decision, a group of students from Lady Sri Ram College and Ramjas College submitted their RTI applications before the assistant registrar of Delhi University on Thursday, seeking to know the details about their answer sheets and evaluation.

The students, who claimed they represented JOSH -- an organisation spearheading a campaign under the RTI Act in various universities -- said they want the information to make the evaluation system more transparent. They said their organisation has already formed RTI bodies in about seven Delhi University colleges to mobilise the RTI campaign and efforts were on to form similar groups in other universities as well.

While conservatives say this is a bad tendency among students which will further erode the teacher-student relationship, others say it could indeed be a timely move in view of cases like the one in Meerut University, in which a bunch of unauthorised people were found to be evaluating degree-standard answer sheets.