Mumbai : The Bombay High Court on Tuesday said there was no need for an urgent hearing on a plea filed by Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) research scholar Ramadas KS, who was suspended from the institute for alleged misconduct and anti-national activities. A vacation bench of Justices Arif Doctor and Somasekhar Sundaresan posted Ramadas’s petition for hearing on June 18 after the summer vacation of the high court. The bench said the plea can wait, and there is no urgency.
Ramadas, a PhD student from the School of Development Studies of TISS, had moved the court earlier this month challenging the April 18 order passed by the institute suspending him for two years. His counsel, Mihir Desai, submitted to the court on Tuesday that pursuant to the suspension order, Ramadas’s scholarship had been stopped, and he was facing difficulties. The institute, in its affidavit, said the student had an alternate remedy, and hence his petition was not maintainable.
Refusing to hear the matter urgently, the court said arguments would have to be first heard on the maintainability issue. As per the TISS’s affidavit, considering the increasing number of serious misconducts by students, a high-level common committee comprising officials in senior posts within the institute was constituted to deal with issues of misconduct and disciplinary action of students. The affidavit said the remedy against any decision by the committee is to approach the vice-chancellor of the institute with a.