Allahabad HC judge helps Dalit student get admission by paying her fee

Allahabad High Court’s Lucknow bench judge Justice Dinesh Kumar Singh paid Rs15,000 to Sanskriti Ranjan, a Dalit student, to help pay her fee and get admission to the Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University).

Sanskriti Ranjan was denied admission to the university due to failure to pay the admission fee. She had secured 95.6% marks in Class 10 and 94% in class 12 before clearing the engineering entrance exam. She was allotted a seat at the Indian Institute of Technology but was unable to secure admission as she could not pay the ₹15,000 fees because of her father’s prolonged kidney ailment.

Ranjan’s father wrote several letters to the university seeking more time to deposit the fee until the court directed the university to admit her and volunteered to pay the fee. Advocates Survesh Kumar Dubey and Samta Rao volunteered to assist Ranjan as she could not arrange a lawyer to represent her after she moved the court.