SURAJ KONAR Vs. UNIVERSITY OF CALCUTTA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) MERIT must be the test when choosing the best, said Honble V. R. Krishna Iyer, J. in Dr. Jagdish Saran and ors. vs. Union of India and ors. , reported in AIR 1980 SC 820. This ought to be the mantra of every public authority entrusted with the task of selecting candidates, be it in the sphere of employment or admission to education institutions or representing the nation or the state in varied activities, and the like. According to the petitioners, there has been a conscious effort on the part of the authorities of the University of Calcutta (hereafter the University) to promote mediocrity at the expense of merit and they urge the Court of Writ to undo the wrong perpetrated by it to their utter detriment and prejudice. To resolve the dispute, its origin, the relief claimed and the respective stands of the rival parties may be noticed.

(2.) THE University published an advertisement on or about 11. 8. 2009 inviting applications for admission to various Post-Graduate courses of study in Arts, Science and Technology conducted by it. So far as Post-Graduate courses leading to conferment of M. Sc. degree is concerned, the university offered, inter alia, the subjects of Physics, Chemistry, Pure Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer and Information Science while for B. Tech. degree it offered, inter alia, Radio Physics and Electronics. The advertisement, however, contained the following stipulation: from this academic year, students of autonomous colleges of Calcutta University will take admission in PG Courses along with students of other colleges who are directly under university of Calcutta. It has been decided to follow a standardization method based on the pattern of Marks distribution of different population of students considering the parameters arithmetic Mean and Standard Deviation.

(3.) IT has been observed that for a sufficiently large sample, most of the distributions follow normal Distribution with two parameters Arithmetic Mean and Standard Deviation and by changing the origin and scale of the variable, the said distribution can be converted to standard Normal Distribution with Arithmetic Mean as zero and Standard Deviation as 1.