Mumbai: Caught between educational organisations eager to cash in on the boom in the drug industry, a frail regulatory mechanism and multitude of court cases, the Pharmacy aspirants in the state are facing uncertainty over college admissions.
There's no clarity on when the Centralised Admission Process (CAP) for the Bachelor of Pharmacy (BPharm) will begin, even as the state-level counselling for all the other professional courses is underway. The admission to health science programmes is also stuck, but it's due to the allegations of malpractices in the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) - Undergraduate and subsequent revision in the results following the Supreme Court (SC)'s directions. While the Pharmacy admissions were late by a few weeks compared to other undergraduate courses even last year, they got even more delayed this time.
While the state government authorities refuse to offer any explanation for this situation, an official from the Pharmacy Council of India (PCI), the apex regulatory body of Pharmacy education in the country, said that the admissions couldn't be started as the approval process for the new colleges and courses as well as for the continuation of approval for existing programmes is yet to be completed.
The official didn't provide a timeline for the approvals, but they pointed out that the SC has set October 31 as the deadline to continue the process, and the applications for review from institutes are to be disposed of by November 30.
"The delay isn't merely on the part of PCI; we are yet to receive No Objection Certificates (NOCs) from the state. There has been some delay due to technical reasons, but the work is going on war footing," said the official.
While PCI has been facing criticism for its long-winded approval process affecting admissions for the past few years, there was a further delay this year a petition filed by some Pharma institutes challenging the necessity of yearly approval for continuation of their courses and sought a one-time approval instead. While a single-judge bench of Justice Justice C Hari Shankar on July 1 accepted the plea, the decision was stayed by a division bench of the court on July 19.
There's another reason for the process getting stretched this year. While PCI, following a recommendation by the Maharashtra government, had decided not to permit any new Pharma institute, course or even division in the state for the academic year 2024-25, the Bombay High Court (HC) ruled against it.
While the state and PCI were hoping to put a halt on mushrooming of Pharmacy institutes in the state, the bench of justices AS Chandurkar and Jitendra Jain, in an interim order, held that PCI was not justified in issuing a blanket direction not to grant permission to any new pharmacy institute or increase existing institutes' intake capacity.
Milind Umekar, National President of All India Pharmacy Teachers Association, has blamed the state government as well as PCI for failing to streamline the college approval process and causing delays in admissions. "Every year, the council approaches SC and gets the deadline for approval extended. They need to have a robust mechanism to ensure that the admissions aren't affected," he said.
The body teachers' has wrote to the state authorities, demanding that they begin the candidate registration process. "Both pharmacy and engineering admissions are carried out on the basis of MHT-CET scores. If engineering admissions are already underway, why put a halt on Pharmacy registrations? The state should complete the registrations before the PCI approvals come so that around 15-20 days are saved," he said.
