Mumbai: Around eight months after the National Medical Commission (NMC) directed the Maharashtra government to cancel the admission of 141 MBBS students who were allotted seats in an institute-level round, the state admission regulator also invalidated admissions of all but one.
About The Decision
The Admission Regulating Authority (ARA) made this decision during a meeting held nearly a month ago, even though the state government had earlier requested NMC, the apex body for medical education in the country, to allow these admissions. While one of the candidates already obtained interim relief from the Supreme Court (SC) last year, the other students lacked such protection.
In October last year, NMC directed the state and 16 medical colleges to cancel the admission of 141 candidates who were admitted in the final round of admission. The unprecedented move was prompted by the state’s decision to let the institutes conduct counselling for the vacant seats in the last round of undergraduate (UG) medical admissions. This, according to NMC, violated a circular it issued in July directing the colleges to carry out the entire admission process in centralised online mode.
As reported by the FPJ earlier, many candidates, who were allotted seats in the final round, claimed that the colleges denied them admissions on flimsy grounds and instead admitted candidates way down the merit list. A state probe, however, later gave a clean chit to one of the institutes, SSPM Medical College in Sindhudurg, against whom four students from marginalised communities had complained. Following NMC’s action, the state didn’t immediately cancel the admissions and instead wrote to the commission to reconsider its decision.
Earlier this year, NMC said that even though the names of the 141 students were included in the list of enrolled candidates, they could still be ousted following a verification process.
Decision Challenged In The Bombay HC
Meanwhile, the apex body’s decision was challenged in the Bombay High Court by multiple candidates. Petitions by three candidates were dismissed by the Nagpur bench in November, holding that the state had no authority to issue the notice for the institute-level stray vacancy round of admission, as it had already conducted three regular and one centralised stray vacancy round.
