The Supreme Court on Friday dismissed a plea to extend the schedule of counselling for filling up as many as 603 vacant seats in post-graduate medical and dental courses in deemed universities and private colleges.

A vacation bench of Justices Deepak Gupta and Surya Kant disposed of the plea by filed by a registered group of over 1,300 educational institutions of the country, seeking to extend the counselling to facilitate admission on vacant seats.

The top court had earlier said that the question is not whether it has power to do it but whether it should allow the deemed universities and colleges to fill up their vacant seats by making an exception to the set schedule of admissions.

Appearing for petitioners, senior advocate Maninder Singh said the court has granted exceptions to the set schedule of admissions in the past also and counselling was allowed even after the schedule got over. He said the country was facing shortage of doctors and filling up the seats could help in controlling the situation.

On June 17, the apex court had asked Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) to make its stand clear on extending the date of counselling for admissions on vacant seats at these deemed universities and colleges. The Centre had earlier informed the top court that it could not find any amicable solution to the problem as directed by it. The top court had on June 12 asked the Centre to try to find out an amicable solution to the problem and said, “If need be, counselling may have to be extended by a short period of a week or so.”

The plea filed by the society said, “The medical colleges/deemed universities are neither praying for enhancement or increase in number of seats nor for lowering of any parameters in order to accommodate additional students.”

“The only prayer is for extension of time for stray vacancy round so that the meritorious students who are already NEET qualified and are already available in the wait list provided by the DGHS, are given another opportunity to join a PG course,” it said.

The petitioner society said that the situation can be rectified if one last chance for counselling for stray vacancy round was granted as was done in the case of Maharashtra after the top court scrapped the ten per cent economically weaker sections quota.

—India Legal Bureau