The Hindu : States can regulate medical, engineering admissions: Kerala

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jul 30, 2003

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States can regulate medical, engineering admissions: Kerala

By J. Venkatesan

NEW DELHI July 29. The Kerala Government today submitted in the Supreme Court that it had the right to regulate admission to professional courses to ensure merit through a common entrance test (CET) and prevent commercialisation and collection of capitation fees. Making this submission before a five-judge Bench, comprising the Chief Justice, V.N. Khare, Justice S.N. Variava, Justice K.G. Balakrishnan, Justice Arijit Pasayat and Justice S.B. Sinha, senior counsel for Kerala, K.K. Venugopal said unless the States had the freedom to select students through CET, the local needs could not be met.

He pointed out that in the 11-judge ruling in the T.M.A. Pai's case, the court had condemned profiteering and collection of capitation fees and said it would be open to the governments to make regulations to prevent this. He said under this judgment, the States had the right to fix not only a percentage of admission based on merit but also fix the fee structure for medical and engineering courses.

Mr. Venugopal, who is also appearing for the All India Council for Technical Education, disputed the notion that after the States started their own CETs and fee structure the number of medical and engineering colleges in the country had come down.

On the contrary, he said, there had been a tremendous growth of such institutions across the country and such a growth would not have been possible if they were not viable. Referring to the contention that unaided religious and linguistic minority professional colleges should be allowed to have separate entrance tests and a different fee structure, Mr. Venugopal said that under such a procedure students would be at the mercy of the institutions.

Karnataka justifies quota

Appearing for Karnataka, senior counsel, P.P. Rao, said the common entrance test conducted by the State for 75 per cent of the seats was only to continue a 11-year tradition of admission of students who qualified for the test and it was in no way detrimental to the managements as most of the students paid no concessional fees. Regulation of fee structure and providing for a machinery to determine the same were intended to ensure excellence in education, while forbidding the charging of capitation fee and profiteering by the institutions.

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