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Appoint officials to visit exam centres hit by load shedding, Bombay high court tells Maharashtra government

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The Bombay high court directed the secretary of school education department to appoint a team of officials to make random visits to exam centres affected by load shedding and verify whether these centres were getting uninterrupted power supply during the exam period, starting from Sept 26.

These officials should visit the centres without informing the board or the 153 affected centres and check whether exam halls have been provided generators or inverters, a division bench of justices Abhay Oka and Girish Kulkarni said.

The bench also directed the government to come out with an action plan in this regard for next year's SSC/HSC exams.

It said: "From its last affidavit, we know what the government's approach is. This is a human issue and we will not leave it at this. We want answers with regard to providing uninterrupted power to all exam centres in the future too."

The directive came during the hearing of a bunch of petitions highlighting the non-implementation of a 2009 high court order directing the state to provide uninterrupted power supply to exam centres.

One of the petitions, filed by Navi Mumbai social worker Vishnu Gawli, alleged that many students had had to write exams in darkness.

On the last hearing, the education board had submitted a list of centres where generators and inverters had already been installed.

However, the state had submitted that using diesel generators was dangerous and should be avoided. The court reproached the government which had remained non-committal on providing uninterrupted power supply during exams starting Sept 26. It said: "If a student prepares for the exam for a year and goes to the centre and finds there is no power, what should he do? Stop writing the exam and come and complaint to you (state)."

No. of students taking SSC/HSC exams starting Sept 26: Around 2.5 lakh.
No. of exam centres affected by load shedding: 153.
No. of students who took SSC/HSC March-April exams: Around 25 to 30 lakh.
Total no. of exam centres for March-April exams: 6,316.
Those hit by load shedding: 577.

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