HC dismisses Punjab private medical colleges’ plea on own test

CHANDIGARH: The Punjab and Haryana high court on Wednesday dismissed an appeal filed by the Punjab Private Self-Financed Dental College Association challenging the government’s decision of not allowing it to admit students on the basis of a common entrance test to be conducted by the association for the MBBS and BDS courses in the state colleges.

The division bench of justices Hemant Gupta and Lisa Gill ruled that the Punjab Private Health Sciences Educational Institutions ( Regulation of Admission, Fixation of Fee and Making of Reservation) Act, 2006, mandated the state government to make admissions to all private health sciences educational institutions on the basis of a common entrance test.

The association had argued that there was no prohibition under the Act for admitting the students on the basis of the common entrance test to be conducted by private medical institutes. It was challenged that the government wrote to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) giving its willingness to participate in the All-India PreMedical/Pre-Dental Entrance Test (AIPMT) for filling 15% of the all-India quota seats in 2013.

The high court ruled that once the statute mandated the state government to make admissions to all private health sciences educational institutions on the basis of the common entrance test, all other methods of admission stood excluded.

“It is the state government which has the jurisdiction to choose the process of the common entrance test or the qualifying examination as the case may be,” the high court observed stating that as per the regulations of the Medical / Dental Council of India, the common entrance test was required to be conducted if the qualifying examination was conducted by different boards in the same state and the admissions were in more than one college.