Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Thursday urged HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar to exempt CBSE Class 12 students from the economics paper re-test on "compassionate grounds".In a letter to Javadekar, Tharoor said the class 12 students are already in the process of preparing for competitive examinations and are under considerable stress and anxiety, and should be exempted from taking the exam again.

The HRD Ministry had last week announced that a re-examination of the CBSE Class 12 economics paper would be held on April 25 following the leak of the paper.It had said the Class 10 mathematics re-test, if required, would be conducted only for the Delhi-NCR region and Haryana in July. However, on Tuesday it decided against conducting the the re-test for the mathematics paper.

"I would request you to kindly consider a similar exemption of Class 12 students from the re-examination of the Economics paper on compassionate grounds," Tharoor said in his letter.Tharoor, who is a former Minister of State for Human Resource Development, urged Javadekar to hold a time-bound thorough inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the papers leak so as to ensure that appropriate punitive measures are taken at the earliest against those who are identified as being responsible for it."Most significantly, it will also allow us to take urgent constructive corrective steps that will be crucial in ensuring that the credibility of these examinations is reinstated," he said.Tharoor said that for the students to be subjected to this kind of uncertainty and additional burden of re-examination due to a few miscreants, was "grossly unfair and it is therefore the duty of the government to ensure that remedial steps are taken at the earliest".

The Congress MP said many of the students have already begun preparations for subsequent competitive examinations such as NEET, scheduled on May 6, and JEE, scheduled on April 15 and 16."For them to be required to prepare for a paper that they have worked hard for previously, would not only be unfair to them but would in fact, be antithetical to the fundamental idea of our education system, which is that hard work and merit is always rewarded in our country," Tharoor said.

"Given the time-sensitive nature of this issue and the distress that it is causing lakhs of students across the country, I would be grateful if you could give this request your most urgent and sympathetic consideration," he urged Javadekar.