Nagpur: The Nagpur bench of Bombay high court on Monday ordered a status quo on Std XI centralized admission process (CAP), with the next hearing on the writ petition regarding it scheduled for July 19.
Petitioner New English School approached the HC earlier this month after it found almost all of its seats put under reserved category by the admission software. Also, on Monday, the education department complied with the court’s July 12 order on a separate petition and ordered Std XI CAP admissions to be stopped specifically for surrendered and vacant minority quota seats.
Of the two separate petitions, Monday’s status quo was related to a possible excess counting of reserved seats in the petitioner’s college. Adv Bhanudas Kulkarni, who has appeared for the petitioner in both cases mentioned above, said “The counting for reserved seats seems to have been done more than once. I have 160 seats of which 151 are being put under reserved category which definitely does not sound right. The education department has counted reservation for not only the total seats but also for individual streams general science, electronics etc.”
He added that in the last hearing, bench headed by justices Bhushan Dharamadhikari and Zaka Haq had asked him to submit data related to it. “Today, we showed the statistics to the honourable court and they have decided to look into it more and kept the next hearing for Thursday,” said Kulkarni.
Till then, a status quo has been put on the admission process for Std XI. What this means is that no new admissions will be done till at least July 19. While the status quo certainly applies to city colleges, Kulkarni said the education department has to take a call for the rest. “The respondent has to interpret the order and take a decision,” said Kulkarni.
The same bench, on July 12, had expressed concern on admissions in minority colleges with regards to seats that were surrendered. A writ petition was filed by a private college management and claimed that minority institutions are surrendering their 50% minority seats and accepting general category students, which ultimately led to increased competition for admissions.
In its order, the court said that the “grievance of the petitioners, who are managements running junior colleges/higher secondary schools before this court, is minority schools preferred not to fill in 50% seats for minority and surrender it so as to attract students participating in CAP round against the same”.
The court went on to add that it is “apparent that the status of minority enjoyed is being compromised in the process to the prejudice of the non minority institutes”.
The bench had mentioned that this is an interim measure for seats that were surrendered to the CAP pool by minority institutions. The court also directed the writ petition to be registered as a public interest litigation (PIL) and the next hearing has been kept for July 25.
