NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday took a suo motu cognisance of death of three civil services aspirants in drowing incident due to flooding of basement by rainwater at a coaching centre in Rajender Nagar area of Delhi.
A bench of Justices Surya Kant and Ujjal Bhuyan said the Union as well as the Delhi governments should come out with guidelines and safety norms for such coaching institutes which have become death chambers.
"The recent unfortunate incidents taking away lives of some of the young ones who joined coaching centres for their career pursuits are eye openers for one and all. We therefore deem it appropriate to expand the scope of these proceedings as suo Motu to issue notice to Union of India, through Ministry of Urban Affairs, and NCT of Delhi to show cause as to what safety norms have been prescribed so far and if so what is the effective mechanism introduced for their compliance," the bench said.
The court issues notice to Centre, Delhi government seeking their response on safety norms, observing such institutions should run online until they are able to fulfill all safety norms under the laws and bylaws.
The court sought to know as to what kind of adequate safety norms were being followed in all the coaching centres. It asked them to bring on record the steps taken by them, after citing the tragic death of three IAS aspirants in Delhi.
The court was hearing another similar plea filed by Coaching Federation of India, against Delhi High Court's order of directing the Delhi government and MCD to close down the coaching centres operating in the State without a valid No-objection certificate (NOC) from the Fire Department after the incident.
The court imposed Rs one lakh cost on the petitioner, saying this is a state of affairs where a lot of young ones coming from places across the country to Delhi have lost their lives.
Three aspirants who lost their lives in incident were identified as Tania Soni (25), Shreya Yadav (25) and Navin Delvin (28).
On August 2, the Delhi High Court had entrusted the probe into the July 27 drowning of three civil services aspirants at the basement of the coaching centre here from Delhi Police to the CBI.
