The Aurangabad bench of the Bombay High Court on Friday directed the state Common Entrance Test (CET) cell to prepare a revised merit list and allow 116 service quota candidates to resubmit the preference of colleges for admission to postgraduate (PG) medical courses.
It has asked the authority to publish a new schedule and merit list for the first Centralized Recruitment Process (CAP) round to the extent of serving doctors from 20 per cent state quota as per prevailing practice. It asked the authorities to complete the first cap round by December 15 so that the second cap round starting from December 16 is not affected.
The Maharashtra government had decided in 2022 to reserve 20 per cent seats in postgraduate (PG) medical courses for doctors serving in government institutions. It has been decided to ensure special medical assistance in public sector health institutions in rural and tribal areas.
A division bench of Justices SG Mehre and SP Brahme was hearing two petitions challenging the state government’s ‘inaction’ in not adding incentive marks for their services in rural, hilly and Naxal-hit areas of the state, despite their clear policy in this regard.
Petitioners Ashish Kumar Patni, Mahesh Gurav and others through advocate Pragya S Talekar said that the authority is not ready to add incentive marks to the percentage published by the National Examination Board as the percentile system has been implemented in the entrance examination this year. of Medical Sciences (NBEMS).
Therefore, the mark-list was finalized without adding the incentive marks for filling up the seats in the cap round and was arbitrary for the applicants.
The court said that when the authority prepared the correct merit list with incentive marks, the first cap round was over and the second round would start from December 16. The petitioners claimed that after the first round was over, they got a bad result. As per the revised merit list may be debarred from admission in the merit list.
The advocate of CET Cell said that by reopening the first round admission schedule, 116 in service candidates may be considered as per the revised merit list. The bench noted that only 4 out of 116 candidates had approached the court, under ‘extraordinary circumstances’, it was passing an order to re-conduct the first cap round and allowed the petitions.