Delhi HC directs DU to provide hostel facility to visually impaired girl

Updated on: Monday, November 26, 2012

The Delhi High Court has directed the Delhi University (DU) to provide a visually-impaired girlhostel facility till October next year to complete her PhD.

The court also asked the hostel management to treat her as student and should not ask her to pay the hostel charges as a guest.

Allowing the plea of 100 percent visually impaired Kumud Rani Garg, a bench of justices Pardeep Nandrajog and Manmohan Singh said, "The petitioner (Garg) be allocated a room within 3 days."

"We dispose of the petition issuing a mandamus to the University to re-allot the hostel seat to the petitioner and to charge from her the normal mess and residency charges which the University takes from other students and not the guest charges. The fee would not be charged for the duration she was not allowed to reside in the hostel," the bench said.

The court rejected the University's argument that "the University Rules / Ordinance has an outer limit of residency being six years with entitlement to be extended by six months upon special considerations."

"In the hostel three percent seats are reserved for visually, hearing and physically impaired students under the Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights and Full Participation) Act, and due to paucity of hostel facilities if anyone is extended the benefit beyond the tenure specified by the University rules and the ordinance, some other deserving case would be adversely affected," the university had argued.

According to DU, Garg had joined the university to pursue a Post-Graduate course in Sanskrit in 2005 and after completing M Phil in 2009, she had taken admission in PhD in October 2009 and her six-year stay in hostel completed in October 2011.

The girl's counsel Pankaj Sinha, however, argued that the girl was not even granted six months extension in special case but the hostel management told her that in case of extension, she will have to pay the hostel charges as a guest.

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