The Bombay High Court on Wednesday directed the Central government to take a relook into the admission process for medical students as many of them are denied admission in colleges across India and they are moving to other countries to pursue courses.
A Division Bench of Chief Justice Dipankar Datta and Justice Girish Kulkarni was hearing a bunch of petitions pertaining to COVID-19 in Maharashtra and complaints of shortage of manpower in terms of medical staff and doctors.
The Bench called upon additional solicitor general (ASG) Anil Singh, appearing for the Centre, and asked him to reconsider the entire admission process for all medical courses. The HC referred to a case where a student scored 192 and managed a seat in a good medical college in the reserved category, but ones with marks as high as 520 did not get a seat.
The Bench said that “there are lakhs of students who score between 250 and 450 and they don’t get admission. The system thinks they aren’t useful”.
The HC further said that the COVID 19 pandemic had been an eye-opener to have a relook into medical infrastructure, education, and medical facilities among many other things.
The Bench said that medical students who do not get admissions in colleges in India then head to “Russia, Germany and other countries and become good doctors and then they do not come back. We need our doctors here in our country at this hour”.
The ASG acknowledged that the issue was important, and definitely it needed to be looked into but said that there were several sensitive issues connected to this issue.
To this, the Bench said, “We are not on that. Don’t speak of sensitivity. We need our doctors.”