The Bombay High Court, in a decision, said that it cannot allow a homeopathy student with a low attendance to appear for the first year repeat examinations. The student has been held as ineligible by the college due to poor attendance in college.
Fakeha Badami had filed a petition in which she claimed that the attendance was poor because the college would not allow her to attend the lectures as she wears hijab. She is a student at Sai Homoeopathic Medical College, located in Bhiwandi.
The college's lawyer, Sahil Salvi, denied the allegations and said that she is not being allowed in the exams due to her poor attendance.
"The college is willing to let her appear for the second repeat exams,scheduled to be held in December this year, provided she attends all therepeat lectures that will be conducted till November," Salvi told a vacationbench of justices S J Kathawalla and A S Gadkari today.
The court accepted this statement and said, "We hope after she attendsthe repeat lectures and appears for the exams the college allows her toattend the regular lectures and not disallow her then saying she iswearing hijab."
Salvi clarified the matter and said that hijab was never the issue.
"She (Badami) has attended only 28 classes. How can we allow her to attend exams now? She is doing a medical course. Without attending the requisite number of classes we cannot allow her to appear for the exams," Justice Kathawalla said.
In her petition, Badami had said that she enrolled in 2016 batch in the Bachelor of Homoeopathic Medicine and Surgery course in the college. The college is affiliated to the Maharashtra University of Health Services (MUHS). She further claimed that she and several other students who wore hijab to the college were denied from entering the premises.
Badami also wrote a letter to the MUHS and the Ministry of AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy) and they asked the college that they cannot compel a student to not wear hijab but the college did not listen.