Saraswati Educational Charitable Trust & Anr. v. Union of India & Ors.
Background
Saraswati Medical College was permitted, by an earlier Supreme Court order, to participate in MBBS counselling for 2017-18 with an admission deadline of 5 September 2017. When the government authority allotted only 150 candidates (of whom just 18 ultimately joined) from its official merit list, the College, without waiting for the authority to send more names, unilaterally issued its own notice and admitted 132 students from a separate pool of 735 applicants who had registered earlier. The Medical Council of India found this violated binding regulations requiring all admissions to go through centralized NEET-based counselling, and directed the College to discharge the 132 students; the College challenged that direction, and the affected students separately sought permission to continue their studies.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court held that the College's self-conducted admissions were a clear and intentional violation of the regulations, since it could have asked the counselling authority for more candidates instead of running its own selection, and the authority had not been negligent in supplying names. However, because the students had already completed their second year of MBBS by the time the case was decided, the Court held that cancelling their admissions at that late stage would serve no purpose, so, as an exceptional, non-precedential measure, it allowed the 132 students to continue and complete their course (subject to two years of post-qualification community service) while penalising the College itself with a Rs. 5 crore deposit, to be used by a court-directed trust for financial assistance to needy medical students in Uttar Pradesh, with the College barred from passing that cost on to the students.
Lesson Learnt
An institution that flouts binding admission regulations cannot expect those irregular admissions to be automatically undone years later at the cost of innocent students who have already progressed through the course, but the Court will still hold the institution itself financially and otherwise accountable for the violation, rather than simply letting it go unpunished.