The Madras High Court on Tuesday granted exemption to students studying in linguistic minority institutions from taking compulsory Tamil examination in this year’s board exams too.

The matter relates to making Tamil language paper compulsory which was challenged by various linguistic minority schools including Linguistic Minorities’ Forum of Tamil Nadu.

The first bench comprising Chief Justice Indira Banerjee and Justice Abdul Quddhose, while referring the matter to a larger bench, passed the interim order today while dealing with a batch of petitions.

Last year, the court had directed the School Education Department to continue the exemption granted to all class 10 students having mother tongue other than Tamil from writing Part I Tamil language during the board exam.

A batch of PILs were filed by linguistic minority institutions seeking a direction to the state school education authorities to exempt students belonging to other states and having different mother tongues, from writing the Tamil language exam and instead to write it in their respective mother tongue.

The court had also in 2016 exempted students from writing the Tamil language paper.

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