Bhopal: But for a writ petition filed by an activist in the High Court against the Medical Education Department, around half of the MBBS seats in the state would have gone to students not domiciled in the state. Due to HC intervention, only 48  non-domiciles have managed to enter the medical colleges in the state.

On August 24, when counselling for NEET 2017 admissions was underway, the High Court instructed the DME to conduct the counselling afresh, while hearing a petition filed by social activist Vinayak Parihar. In his petition, Parihar had contended that non-domicile students were being given admissions, ignoring the rights of the students of the state.

When the counselling was conducted afresh, as many as 300 non-domicile students, who had earlier given admission on the basis of false declarations regarding their domicile status, were shown the door. Medical education deputy director Dr Shashi Gandhi said there are a total of 1,122 seats in government and private medical colleges in the state. All the seats have been filled, barring 33 in two private medical colleges, which were rendered vacant after the admissions given against them were cancelled.

Around 325 seats are vacant in BDS course in government and private colleges. Of the 176 seats reserved for NRIs in the state, only 46 seats went to NRIs, 68 went to domicile NRIs and the remaining 112 seats were declared unreserved.  She claimed that after the left out (third) round, no seats were vacant in MBBS course. But subsequently 40 ST and 29 SC students did not take admissions and these seats fell vacant. As a result, the DME had to conduct the Mop-up round to fill the 94 seats (including some others which fell vacant) in just five hours.

According to Supreme Court orders in the Mop-up round, the students from other states also have to be considered for admissions. Against these 94 seats, only 48 students from other states could get admissions. “We have done our best to protect the rights of the state domicile students”, she said.