The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to pass an interim order directing the Medical Council of India and the CBSE to declare a separate merit list for CBSE and State Board students in the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) held on July 24 for medical admissions in private colleges across the country.
A bench of Justices Kurian Joseph and Shiva Kirti Singh, however, issued notice to the Centre, the MCI and CBSE on a batch of writ petitions from S Rishesh and 20 others challenging the NEET ordinance (which has now become an Act) exempting Government colleges from NEET and providing for admission of students in private medical colleges only through NEET.
After hearing arguments from senior counsel Rahul Srivastava, Sanjay Hegde, Jayant Muthuraj and V. Balaji, Justice Shiva Kirti Singh (who was part of the three-judge bench headed by Justice Anil R. Dave) said “all these arguments were advanced earlier. We have already refused stay. Admissions can be either through NEET or not. We can’t dilute the ordinance. We will issue notice and tag all petitions to be listed together.”
The petitioners mostly from Tamil Nadu also wanted an interim direction that admissions for this year to private medical colleges should be done only on the basis of higher secondary marks as was done last year; or in the alternative direct MCI and CBSE to provide a proportionate quota to the students who studied in Tamil Nadu State Board and participated in the NEET conducted for the Academic year 2016-2017 by publishing a separate merit list. The petitioners submitted that the syllabus of CBSE and method of teaching are totally different from the syllabus and method of teaching in the state board. The students studying in the Tamil Nadu State Board are not trained for objective type of entrance test. Now compelling the state board students to study a different syllabus, to write a different type of exam in a short span of two months and to compete with CBSE students is treating unequal as equal and the same would violate Article 14 of the Constitution. They further submitted that permitting CBSE to conduct entrance test only in English and Hindi violates the federal system.
