The students informed the court of a notification issued by the state on March 8, announcing 16 per cent reservation of seats for SEBC, including the Marathas, in educational institutions.THE NAGPUR bench of the Bombay High Court on Thursday held that the 16 per cent reservation granted to the Maratha community will not apply to postgraduate medical admissions this year, as the Socially and Educationally Backward Class Act, 2018 — which effected the reservation — came into force after the admission procedure had already begun.
The court was of the view that the reservation applied in the admissions to postgraduation courses in medical sciences this year is “arbitrary” and deserves to be quashed and set aside.
A Division Bench of Justice Sunil B Shukre and Justice Pushpa Ganediwala held, “…the revised seat matrix published on 27.3.2019 providing for reservation of SEBC (Socially and Educationally Backward Class) candidates has to be held and is held as arbitrary, violative of the mandate… as it creates unequal competition and violates principles of rule of law, hit by the rigor of Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution of India and as such deserves to be quashed and set aside.”
The petitions were moved by Dr Sanjana Wadewale and several Bachelor of Dental Surgery and Bachelor of Medicine graduates. The students informed the court of a notification issued by the state on March 8, announcing 16 per cent reservation of seats for SEBC, including the Marathas, in educational institutions. The petitioners added that the notification had affected the ongoing admission process for postgraduation courses in MDS, MD, MS and Diploma in Medical Sciences for 2019.
The State Common Entrance Test Cell and Directorate of Medical Education and Research, to give effect to the notification of March 8, issued a revised provisional seat matrix later in the same month. Out of 383 PG seats available in the state, 61 seats, according to the revised seat matrix, were reserved for SEBC candidates. The petitioners told the court that the provisions of SEBC Act does not apply in a case in which the admission process had already been initiated before the Act came into being.
The counsel for the state government told the court that the actual admission process started on February 25, when state quota seats became available. This was much later than the day the SEBC Act came into force, the counsel said. “The admission process in the real sense of the term began only after commencement of the SEBC Act and in any case, the intention of the government to apply the provisions of this Act to the present admission process having been made clear in February 2019 itself, the petitioners ought to have approached this court much earlier.”
Following this, the bench held: “Those medical admissions in which the procedure for entrance test has already been initiated would not be affected by the applicability of the Act.”
The court said that in this case, the procedure for entrance test has begun on October 16, 2018 for MDS (Master of Dental Surgery) course and on November 2, 2018 for MD/MS/PG courses. This was well before November 30, 2018 — the date of the commencement of the Act. The court added that there was no delay caused by the petitioners as alleged by the state government in filing the petition.
The bench held, “This procedure was for holding of the entrance test and not for filling seats in the state quota. Therefore, the provisions of the Act would have no application to the current admission process. If such an interpretation is not given, the whole provision of Section 16 (2) of the Act would turn into a dead letter of law, thereby rendering the legislative intent to be redundant.”
Section 16(2) of the SEBC Act states that the Act shall not apply to admissions in educational institutions and the cases in which the admission process has already been initiated before the commencement of the Act.
