New Delhi (Gurpreet Singh): The Central Government on Friday informed the Supreme Court that it is actively considering a comprehensive policy to accommodate private candidates from West Asia whose Class 12 board results remain unannounced following the cancellation of exams by the Central Board of Secondary Education due to regional security concerns. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told a bench comprising Justice AG Masih and Justice Vijay Bisnoi that the government is evaluating a broader policy framework to assist similarly situated students caught in the administrative limbo. Following the submission, the top court deferred the hearing on the matter to June 22.
The administrative delay has triggered urgent intervention from the judiciary. During an earlier hearing on June 8, the Supreme Court issued a stern reminder to the CBSE and its regional office regarding the time-sensitive nature of higher education deadlines, instructing the board to work round the clock to find a resolution before university admission windows close. The judicial scrutiny stems from a petition filed by Pranshu Jigarkumar Patel, an overseas student from Saudi Arabia, who challenged the board’s failure to compute and release his Class 12 improvement examination results under its special assessment guidelines.
The petitioner, a private candidate from the International Indian School in Al Jubail, registered for improvement exams in Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, English, and Computer Science after his initial board appearance in 2025. However, as the geopolitical conflict involving Iran, Israel, and the United States escalated, the CBSE cancelled several scheduled exam dates across seven Middle Eastern nations, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Iran, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Consequently, the student was only able to sit for his Physics and Chemistry papers, while his remaining three examinations were completely suspended.
Although the CBSE introduced a dedicated assessment scheme on March 27, 2026, to calculate scores based on internal school records—such as quarterly, half-yearly, and pre-board examinations—for impacted students in West Asia, it failed to clarify if the policy extended to private improvement candidates. When the general board results were published on May 13, 2026, the petitioner’s status was marked as “RL” (Result Later). Subsequent representations sent by the student to the CBSE throughout May went completely unacknowledged, forcing him to approach the apex court after the Delhi High Court initially declined to entertain the plea.
The prolonged regulatory deadlock has severely disrupted the student’s higher education trajectory, blocking his provisional enrollment in the Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence program at Dhirubhai Ambani University in Gandhinagar, which required a final board result update by June 1, 2026. The petition requests the Supreme Court to direct the CBSE to immediately process his scores using past school data under the March 27 notification, or alternatively, conduct special, isolated examinations for the cancelled subjects to prevent a total loss of his academic year.
