Nagpur: The 16 per cent reservation for the Maratha community under the Socially and Economically Backward Classes (SEBC) category will not be applicable for post-graduate medical courses this year, the Bombay High Court said on Thursday.
On March 8, the Maharashtra government had written a letter to the Directorate of Medical Education and Research (DMER) to incorporate the SEBC quota from the 2019 academic session in the PG medical courses. Shivani Raghuwanshi and Pranjali Charde moved the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court contending that the government’s decision to introduce the quota this year was unconstitutional.
Appearing for the petitioners, advocate Ashwin Deshpande argued that the SEBC Act (which provided the new quota) came into force on November 30, 2018, while the admission process for the PG medical courses had started prior to that, on October 16.
Therefore, the provisions of the Maratha quota act would not be applicable to this year’s admissions, he contended. A division bench of justices Sunil Shukre and Pushpa Ganediwala said in their order that the March 8 notification (about the implementation of the new quota) shall not be applicable to the admission process, which had started earlier.
