Following Supreme Court’s order which prohibited the private medical colleges from holding counselling sessions for giving admissions to the MBBS course, the Uttarakhand Government is toying with the idea of cancelling the counselling of State quota seats and holding single counselling for all medical colleges (Government and private) of the State. After hectic parleys which saw the senior officials of state government, HNB Medical Education University, medical education director and representatives of private medical college huddling for many meetings on Friday it was decided to take legal opinion on the issue.
The HNB medical education university also withheld the list of candidates after second counseling which was scheduled to be released on Friday.
The Medical Education director, Dr Ashutosh Sayana said that the issue has been sent for legal opinion after which a final decision would be taken. In all probability the counseling for state quota of seats in state would again be held with authorities giving time of two days for locking the choice of colleges and then a final combined list would be released based on which the admissions would be given in different medical and dental colleges.
The Supreme Court (SC) in a landmark judgment had set up holding of National Eligibility Entrance Test (NEET) as one single examination for admissions in all the medical colleges of the country. After this order, all the government and private medical colleges were giving admissions on the basis of NEET merit but in some states the private colleges were holding their own counseling. The counseling by the private colleges was objected by the Madhya Pradesh government which challenged it in SC which ordered that single counseling should be held for all the government and private medical colleges for filling the state quota of MBBS seats. The government medical colleges have 85 percent of seats under state quota while 15 seats are for all India quota.
It is learnt that the HNB medical education university and the medical education directorate of Uttarakhand were in favour of holding combined counseling for both the private and government medial colleges but the private medical colleges managed to pressurize the government for holding separate counseling so that they could maneuver things. As a result of which three counseling sessions are going on in Uttarakhand to fill seats of medical colleges.
In the state, counseling is in progress for the government medical colleges and 50 seats of private colleges submitted to the state government the other is of Himalayan Institute of Medical Sciences (HIMS) for its 125 seats and third one is of a consortium consisting of Sri Guru Ram Rai (SGRR0 Medical colleges and private dental colleges.
Meanwhile, the students are the worst sufferers of the uncertainty.