Supreme Court Extends Exemption To Students From Writing Tamil Language Paper In Class 10

The ruling was made when the Supreme Court was deliberating a petition challenging the Madras High Court's order from September 2019 refusing to invalidate the rules allowing students to opt out of taking the Tamil language portion of the Class 10 board exam.

The interim arrangement, as mentioned in the high court order, which had given exemption to students who are studying in linguistic minority schools from writing Tamil language papers in the Class 10 examination under Batch-I for academic years 2020 to 2022, was observed by a bench of Justices SK Kaul and Manoj Misra. The bench recommended that the interim arrangement be extended for another year. It scheduled the hearing for the week beginning July 11.

Meanwhile, in September 2019, the high court ruled that the government letter from July 18, 2016, which set forth the criteria for exempting pupils from taking the Tamil language portion of the Class 10 board test, could not be overturned. However, for the 2020–2022 academic years, the high court had ordered the relevant authorities to exempt children in linguistic minority schools from writing the Tamil language paper in the Class 10 test.

Furthermore, the Linguistic Minorities Forum of Tamil Nadu argued in its petition to the Supreme Court that the crucial legal issue for the court to decide on is whether the state can "infringe" on the rights of linguistic minorities protected by the Constitution by enacting laws that make Tamil a required language and thereby prevent students from linguistic minorities from learning their mother tongue.