With just one day remaining, the face off between the medical education department and two private medical colleges over admissions in first year MBBS course continues. These two colleges, Himalayan Institute of Medical Sciences and Guru Ram Rai medical college have refused to grant admissions to the students till the issue of fees is settled. Monday (July 31) is the last date of admissions for first phase of counseling. To make things worse these two private colleges would move to the High Court (HC) on Monday on the issue.

Meanwhile the standoff between these colleges and the medical education department has throw spanner in the entire mechanism of counseling and allotment of seats.Both these colleges have 150 seats each with 75 seats reserved for the students of Uttarakhand under state quota. 

On Saturday a meeting was convened by the state government to break the impasse but it failed to yield any result on the very important issue.

The Medical Education director, Dr Ashutosh Sayana on his part has dispatched a letter to the two private colleges in which he has warned of action if the students allotted seats by the Centralised counseling board are not granted admission by July 31.In his letter Sayana has said that the counselling board has a mandate for conducting the centralised counselling for admissions in MBBS courses of all the medical colleges of the state.

When contacted, the spokesperson of the Guru Ram Rai Medical College Bhupendra Raturi accepted that no solution of the standoff has so far been achieved.

The intention of a steep hike in the fees of the MBBS course is the basic reason behind the standoff. These two private colleges want that the fee should be increased to Rs 19 lakh per year. At present the annual fees for the MBBS course in these colleges is Rs 5.5 lakh.

These private colleges are part of universities and they show the provision in the Universities act in which it is mentioned that they can decide the fee on their own.  These colleges contend that as per the rules they should decide the fees and send is to the fee determination committee and the committee should clear it.

The online counseling for Under Graduate (UG) course of MBBS and BDS started on July 16 and the candidates did on line registration and choice filling of indicative seat till July 21. The centralized counselling board released the merit list consisting of 8674 candidates on July 22 and the students were allotted seats in different colleges on July 24. 

The student allotted seats in first phase of counselling should take admission by July 31.  The second session of counselling would start on August 08.

However the refusal to grant admissions by the private medical colleges has put up a question mark on the entire process and put the future of bright youngsters at stake.