A chicken flu, of the more conventional pox kind, is playing havoc with class and examination schedules on a Salt Lake campus — thanks to a panic petition from budding lawyers.

Summer vacation has come two months early at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS), with the authorities giving in to student pressure for a shutdown, following a string of chicken pox cases in class.

It all began, according to the students, more than a month ago, when one hosteller caught the bug, spreading it to a few others. “But keeping them in isolation was impossible. And last week, we had about five cases in 48 hours, which spread panic,” explains Rohit Das, third-year students’ representative.

When an attempt was made by the authorities to follow the policy of sending home the afflicted, the lawyers of the future closed ranks and delved deep into their books to come up with a clause for their cause.

“We finally found a precedent — a closure on the Bangalore campus for chicken pox. So, we convinced the officials to suspend classes,” says Aditi Jha, another law student.

The crux of the students’ case was Section 269 of the IPC, which states that it is an offence to “negligently spread infectious diseases”, thus putting an end to all plans of sending the chicken pox victims home on long-distance trains. Not to mention that it would be “unfair” to make these students sit for an exam in March.

Armed with a joint petition, student representatives sat for a series of meetings with vice-chancellor Prof B.S. Chimni, successor to N.R. Madhava Menon. “Despite the logistical problems, the authorities were very cooperative, and the whole thing happened within a couple of days. Although the office and library are open and the placement committee is at work, classes have been stopped,” explains Das.

The routine snag was in rearranging the dates for exams, vivas, presentations and classes, for this semester and the next. So here’s the new schedule — holidays till May, followed by 10 days of classes from Labour Day, exams from 12 May, and the new semester from June. With 20 days lost this semester, the vivas and presentations will be carried over into next semester, after classes.

The official line on Sunday from the swank Salt Lake campus — the first in recent memory to shut down for chicken pox — was “no comment”.