Above: Medical college students taking classroom lessons (representative image)

Another eye-opening case of scam in medical colleges admission came into the light on Thursday (November 23) when Supreme Court struck down a Allahabad HC order for allowing admissions in a medical college in UP.

Annulling the order, the Supreme Court bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud directed the Lucknow-based medical college to pay Rs 10 lakh each to 150 students who were illegally admitted as compensation alongwith with the refund of admission fee paid by the students

The bench also imposed a cost of Rs 25 lakh to the medical college. The bench directed it to submit the cost to the SC registry.

Terming it as the case of “judicial indiscipline and impropriety”, the bench said “it is most unfortunate, which may cause [an] institutional problem”.

The case assumes importance in the wake of the recent arrest retired judge of the Orissa HC, Justice
I M Quddusi who allegedly colluded to secure a favorable order for a medical college.

On September 21, CBI arrested Justice Ishrat Masroor Quddusi and four others in a corruption case. The others arrested in the case were BP Yadav and Palash Yadav of the Prasad Educational Trust, which runs a medical college—Prasad Institute of Medical Science—in Lucknow; Biswanath Agrawala, a middleman; and hawala operator Ramdev Saraswat.

Manoj Jain of the special court handling CBI cases sent Quddusi and the others to custody after the CBI said their custodial interrogation was required to unearth the “larger nexus” in the alleged medical college scam.

It may be recalled that the Centre had earlier de-registered 46 medical colleges for substandard facilities. Custodians of the Prasad Education Trust in Uttar Pradesh approached the Supreme Court for relief after they were debarred in August 2017 from admitting students for academic years 2017-18 and 2018-19.

—India Legal Bureau