Telangana High Court halts counselling for medical seats

The Telangana High Court on Wednesday stayed the MBBS, BDS and other medical courses admissions made in the second phase of counselling under the 50 per cent competent authority quota.

A division bench comprising Justice Sanjay Kumar and Justice P. Keshav Rao gave the interim order while hearing a petition filed by Nootenki Bhavana and four other students from Adilabad, Wanapa-rthi and Nirmal districts.

The petitioners had alleged that there were irregularities in the admission process adopted by the university and had denied the rights of reservation category students contemplated under GO114 and GO 550. 

They said that according to a Supreme Court judgment, the authorities must follow GO 550 to select students for engineering, medical, and other professional courses.  A. Satya Prasad, senior counsel representing the petitioners, said that the reserved seats were filled up first and the OC category later, when the open competition seats were supposed to be filled first before taking up the reserved seats.

He said that because of this, reserved candidates who got high marks were given seats in the reserved category, though they stood a good chance in the merit list.

“If the OC category seats were filled up at the first instance, these candidates would have got seats under it. Several



SC, ST and BC students would have got seats now occupied by these candidates,” Mr Prasad said.

The petitioners said the number of MBBS seats was 2,535, apart from 330 minority college seats. Of these, or 1,267, were to be allotted to students from reserved categories, excluding the merit reserved candidates.

By virtue of the faulty procedure adopted by the competent authority, many candidates entitled to get seats in the open category were compelled to take seats in the reserved category.

The petition said the cut-off marks in the OC category was 509 and cut-off rank 43,868. If proper procedure was followed, the cut-off would have been 512 and many reserved category candidates could have secured seats. They listed the cut-off marks as follows: SC: 420 marks (Rank: 1,09,080); ST: 443 marks (Rank: 88,880); BC-A: 421 marks (Rank: 1,02,981); BC-B: 485 marks (Rank: 58,293); BC-C: 445 marks (Rank: 87,265); BC-D: 481 marks (Rank: 61,005); BC-E: 444 marks (Rank: 88,368).

After verifying the records, the bench felt wrong had been done and stayed the admission process pertaining to the second phase. The first phase admissions may remain intact as the petitioners said they had no grievance because GO 550 was followed in that phase. The matter has been posted to August 13.