For maintaining ‘equity and excellence in academic institutions’ the Himachal Pradesh High Court on Thursday rubbished a bunch of petitions that had sought dilution in admission criteria so as to fill up vacant seats in technical courses.
Challenging a Government diktat imposing a common merit based process for admissions, H-Private Universities Management Associations (H-PUMA) and Private Technical Institutions Association HP had petitioned before the court that it amounted to unreasonable interference in their right to administer the institutions.
The private institutions had pleaded that because of the regulatory process, seats in their respective colleges were lying vacant due to non-availability of students.
The petitioners pointed out that number of sanctioned B Tech seats in Government institutions in Himachal was 660 (120 in HPU and 540 in other Govt institutions) and in private institutions there were 7,680 in private engineering colleges and another 7,820 in private universities.
Admissions made for B Tech courses in private colleges of Himachal in 2012-13 through Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) was 1049, in 2013-14 it was 429 and in 2014-15 less than 500 students had registered for admissions with HP Technical University, which included both for Government as well as private institutions.
With this background, the petitioners pleaded that they “cannot be asked to perform the impossible and, therefore, should be permitted to devise a merit based process themselves rather than permitting the State to impose its determination of merit.”
Not convinced by the argument of Private institutions the division bench of Chief Justice Mansoor Ahmad Mir and Justice Tarlok Singh Chauhan observed, “equity and excellence in academic institutions have to be maintained and what better way can it be maintained than by ensuring that each students competes in the same examination i.e. Combined Entrance Test (CET) so as to ensure that in terms of the access to education (equity) and merit of students (excellence) a common platform is that for admissions into professional colleges.