The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Teachers now outside purview of COPRA

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Sunday, Nov 08, 2009
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Teachers now outside purview of COPRA

B.S. Ramesh

BANGALORE: Teachers in the State, particularly those who conduct examinations and evaluate answer scripts, can breathe easy now.

The Supreme Court has said that school examination boards are not service providers and students are not consumers. Therefore, no complaint can be lodged against teachers under the Consumer Protection Act (COPRA).

The Supreme Court decision comes as a huge “relief” to the officials of the Education Department as it had been struggling to fight cases lodged against teacher evaluators in the Karnataka State Consumer Forum.

The forum had not only been allowing applications against evaluators, but also penalising them saying they come under the consumer net as they are service providers and that the students are consumers.

The department had not been able to do anything against the filing of cases against the examination board and evaluators as the forum had been basing its decisions on a 1994 judgment of the Supreme Court (Lucknow Development Authority versus M.K. Gupta, SCC 2431) that said: “A statutory authority that offers any kind of service for which a fee is charged will be amenable to the jurisdiction of the consumer fora.”

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