The Delhi High Court on Tuesday stayed the Central Information Commission’s order asking the Central Board of Secondary Examination to allow Union minister Smriti Irani’s Class 10 and 12 board exam records to be examined, ANI reported. The court’s order was based on a petition filed by the educational board, which had said that the records were “personal information”.
On January 17, the commission had directed the office of the minister of textiles and Delhi’s Holy Child Auxilium School, from where Irani claimed to have graduated, to provide her examination roll number to CBSE’s Ajmer division so that her records could be traced from the yet-to-be digitised database. The Ajmer office has the board exam records for 1991 and 1993.
Irani’s educational records have been under the scanner for a long time now. On October 18 last year, Delhi’s Patiala House Court had dismissed a petition that had called for Irani to be summoned in connection with a case related to her educational qualification. A freelance writer had filed a case against the former human resource development minister in 2015, claiming that the information on the degrees she had provided before the 2004 Lok Sabha elections differed from her 2011 Rajya Sabha nomination papers in Gujarat.
The CIC, on January 8, had directed Delhi University officials to allow the inspection of records of students who had secured their BA degree in 1978, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s. The order, passed by Information Commissioner Sridhar Acharyulu, had dismissed DU Central Public Information Officer Meenakshi Sahay’s denial of an RTI query on the grounds that the information was personal, saying the rejection had “neither merit, nor legality”.
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