A bench of Justices AR Dave, Vikramajit Sen and UU Lalit of
Supreme Court of India in an important decision on 18th September 2014
permitted medical colleges to fill vacant seats for the academic year 2014-15
till 30th September 2014. Court passed the order under Article 142 of
Constitution of India, looking at the peculiar facts and circumstances of the
case and, especially, when several seats for medical admission are likely to remain
vacant for the academic year 2014-15.
Court stated “we are of the view that
these matters require urgent consideration …We are conscious of the fact that number of physicians in our country is much less than
what is required and because of non-renewal of recognition of several medical colleges, our citizens would
be deprived of a good number of physicians and therefore, we are constrained to
pass this order, whereby at least there would be some increase in the number of
physicians after five years. We are running against time because the last date
for giving admissions to MBBS Course for the academic year 2014-15 is 30th
September, 2014. We also desire to
reconsider the directions given by this Court in the judgment of Priya Gupta v.
State of Chhattisgarh [(2012) 7 SCC 433], but at this juncture, as we do not
have sufficient time to decide all these petitions finally, we are passing this
interim order and the matter with regard to reconsideration of the aforestated
judgment would be considered while finally disposing of this group of
petitions”.
The Supreme Court permitted this to the medical colleges, as
a special case, on the condition that they file undertakings within 10 days to
the effect that there is no defect in the medical colleges run by them and that
if the statement made in the undertaking is found to be incorrect at the time
of the next inspection, their deposit with the Medical Council of India, which
is around Rs.10 crores, will be forfeited by way of penalty.
The order was
passed in Writ Petition (Civil) No.469/2014 titled as ‘HIND CHARITABLE TRUST
SHEKHAR HOSPITAL PVT. LTD. vs Union of India & others’, and other connected
matters.
Click below to read the Full Text of the Order.
