The Supreme Court on Friday dismissed a batch of petitions seeking to fill the vacant 1,456 seats in NEET-PG-2021. The apex court said that the decision of the Centre and the Medical Counselling Committee (MCC) not to have a special stray round of counselling for All India Quota in NEET-PG-2021 is “in the interest of medical education and public health”. The vacation bench of Justices MR Shah and Aniruddha Bose said there cannot be any compromise with the quality of medical education which will affect public health.
“The decision of the Union Government and the MCC not to have a special stray round of counselling is in the interest of medical education and public health. There cannot be any compromise with the merits and/or quality of medical education, which may ultimately affect public health,” the bench said while noting that it was a conscious decision and cannot be termed as arbitrary.
The top court said the process of admission and that too in medical education cannot be endless and it must end at a particular point in time. The time schedule has to be adhered to, otherwise, ultimately, it may affect medical education and public health, it said. The apex court said the MCC and the Union of India have to adhere to the time schedule for completing the admission process when the current admission of NEET-PG-2021 is already behind the schedule.
“When a conscious decision is taken by the Union Government/the medical counselling committee, not to conduct a further special stray round counselling, it cannot be said that the same is arbitrary,” the bench said. The apex court said the students cannot pray for admission to the vacant seats, which are mostly non-clinical, after approximately one year of the academic session and after eight to nine rounds of counselling.
“Apart from the fact that after the closure of the last round of counselling on May 7, 2022, the entire software mechanism has been closed and the security deposit is refunded to the eligible candidates. It is to be noted that the admission process for NEET-PG-2022 has already begun, the results for the NEET-PG-2022 has been announced on June 1, 2022, and as per the time schedule, the counselling process is going to start in July 2022,” the bench said by dismissing the petitions.
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