Madras High Court relief for non-Tamil students

The first bench comprising Chief Justice Indira Banerjee and Justice Abdul Quddhose while referring the matter to a larger bench passed the interim order of extending the exemption while dealing with a batch of petitions. 

The matter relates to making Tamil language paper as compulsory for all which was challenged by various Linguistic Minority Schools including Linguistic minorities’ forum of Tamil Nadu. 

It may be noted that since 2016, the high court has been exempting linguistic minority students from writing the Tamil language examination. 

It was submitted that even though a legislation making Tamil paper compulsory was enacted in 2006, it was brought into force only in 2014, and all schools were informed about the decision only in June that year. Till 2014, the government had not appointed Tamil teachers in schools for teaching Tamil language and only after writ petitions were filed the government started appointing Tamil teachers.