No admissions will be taken up under sports quota for MBBS, engineering and agriculture professional courses for the current academic year (2018-19) in Telangana.
Passing this interim order, a division bench of the Hyderabad High Court on Friday directed the Telangana government and others to file counter-affidavits within six weeks over a writ petition filed by some students challenging procedures adopted in admissions under sports quota. B. Rachna Reddy presented arguments on behalf of the petitioners.
Though the order was a painful option, “this surgical strike” appeared to be the need of the hour, the bench comprising Justice V. Ramasubramanian and Justice Kongara Vijaya Lakshmi said.
The bench said that the TS government had already ordered an inquiry by the ACB against the officials of the Sports Authority of Telangana into a ‘huge scandal’ in admissions under sports quota. While the unified Andhra Pradesh government reserved 0.5% of seats in professional courses for sports persons, the Telangana government enhanced it to 2%.
“But the way in which this reservation is worked out — with over-ambitious parents, avaricious officials and exploitative sports bodies competing with each other making a mockery of reservation — litigation is rising,” the bench observed. Following an order by the Telangana Chief Minister into the scandal, the ACB issued a First Information Report on June 5. A Deputy Director of Sports department was arrested.
Stating that disputes over admission into professional courses were not new, the bench noted that one of them was that many persons produced false certificates and there was no mechanism for verifying the genuineness of the certificates. Though the government went on issuing orders to resolve disputes, they ended up only creating problems.
Some of the games among the 48 notified by the government for admission under sports quota were unheard of, the bench noted. Parents who were mad after making their children medical doctors were training their children in certain strange categories of sports. This was only to get a certificate at the national level without any serious competition, the bench observed.