The Supreme Court has issued notices on a student’s plea for transfer from IIT Kharagpur to IIT Delhi on the grounds that he has developed “suicidal ideation” owing to his “borderline personality disorder”.
According to the Bachelor of Architecture student, he needs specialised Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (RTMS) therapy, available at AIIMS Delhi at an affordable cost.
He says the authorities rejected his plea despite the rules allowing such transfers.
The bench of Justice B.V. Nagarathna and Justice R. Mahadevan has sought responses from the IITs in Kharagpur and Delhi as well as AIIMS Delhi. It has posted the next hearing to October 10.
“The severity of symptom recurrence at IIT Kharagpur, compounded by geographical isolation from family support in Punjab and absence of regional peers for social adjustment, created an acute medical emergency manifesting in suicidal ideation and complete inability to perform academic or daily functions,” the petition, filed through advocate-on-record Vipin Nair, says.
“The critical need for immediate access to affordable RTMS therapy at AIIMS Delhi, combined with essential parental supervision as later prescribed by IIT Kharagpur’s own B.C. Roy Technology
Hospital, necessitated urgent intervention.”
RTMS facilities in Bengal are available in Calcutta but not in Kharagpur, and at expensive private hospitals, the petition says. AIIMS provides this treatment at cheaper cost, and is merely 7km from the IIT Delhi campus, it adds.
“The rules (say) that undergraduate students may be transferred between IITs on medical grounds, with placement either according to their JEE Advanced All India Rank (AIR), or to the program in which the lowest-ranked student was admitted that year,” the petition says.
Chairman JEE (Advanced) Sudipto Chakraborty had formally rejected the student’s transfer request citing four primary grounds that the petitioner says “fundamentally misinterpret the Inter-IIT Transfer Rules: (a) alleged insufficient JEE rank (ignoring the rule’s explicit provision for placement ‘in the program where the lowest AIR was admitted’), (b)curriculum differences (contradicting the rules’ specific credit redemption provisions), (c) alleged non-equivalency of BArch and BTech admission processes (despite both being JEE Advanced-based admission processes, (d) and claimed inapplicability of transfer rules to Architecture students (contradicting the rules’ clear ‘undergraduate student’ language).”