BANGALORE: The Karnataka Professional Educational Institutions (Regulation of Admission and Determination of Fee) Bill, 2006, which was moved in the Legislative Council on Thursday, lacks teeth, does not address any of the concerns of the students or offer solutions to some of the problems surrounding the admission and fee regulation policies, Leader of the Opposition H.K. Patil has said.

Initiating the discussion on the Bill soon after it was tabled by Higher Education Minister D.H. Shankaramurthy, Mr. Patil said that without appropriating seats from the managements of private medical, dental and engineering colleges, the Government could not make allocations under various categories or impose the merit list and roster system for reserved categories.

`Cannot interfere'

Mr. Shankaramurthy said the Bill sought to provide for allotment of seats that might be surrendered by the private managements, as per the Supreme Court judgment in P.A. Inamdar and others vs. Maharashtra case. The Government could not interfere in the seat allocation process of private institutions, he said.

Mr. Patil said that that did not bar the State Government from adopting appropriate legislation through which seats could be appropriated. "Neither have you read the judgment fully, nor have your officials guided you properly. In fact, I would say the bureaucrats have deliberately misled you and allowed misconceptions and misinterpretations to cloud your judgement while this Bill was being drafted," Mr. Patil said.

The Bill also had not addressed the way some issues, such as allocation of seats in colleges offering courses in Indian systems of medicine, were handled. It was time a separate mechanism was created for this stream of courses in medicine, he said. While the Supreme Court judgment talked of an appellate authority on fee regulation, the Bill did not say how fee determination by private institutions would be regulated.

M.P. Nadagouda (Janata Dal-U) too said the Bill seemed out of place and without purpose. "We have passed a Bill that makes higher education a self-financing sector, and we promptly handed over the whole education system to the whims of the affluent," he said.

Dr. Nadagouda wondered where was the policy that addressed the needs of poor students aspiring to become engineers or doctors. Why was the Government subsidising the ambitions of the affluent, he asked.

Bill termed vague

B.K. Chandrashekar (Congress) said the Bill was "delightfully vague" on vital issues. Where was the explicit clause that commits the Government to a definite quota for Karnataka students? How would the Government reconcile the quota and its plans to have an all-India test, he asked.

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