Rerun your medical admissions to ensure quotas do not exceed: HC to AP, Telangana health varsities

HYDERABAD: Stating that it would ensure that neither the candidates from the open category nor from the reserved category would suffer any decrease in their prescribed 50 percent quotas in medical admissions, the Hyderabad high court on Thursday directed the health universities of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana to rerun the ongoing admissions process in tune with this objective and furnish the data to the court by Friday.
The bench of Justice V Ramsubramanian and Justice N Balayogi gave this interim direction to the varsities while hearing scores of petitions that challenged the GO 550, which allowed sliding of seats by meritorious. The HC last year stayed a portion of this GO and directed the authorities to ensure that the sliding done by a meritorious weaker community candidate does not result in loss of seats to open category.
But scores of students from the reserved category have now come to the court saying that the authorities are implementing this GO and the HC order in a manner that is detrimental to the students from the reserved categories. Senior counsel K G Krishna Murthy appeared for the reserved categories and made a suggestion to the court stating that the seats in the most preferred colleges could be filled up on the basis of merit without sliding. This will ensure that all the meritorious candidates are accommodated and the reserved candidates do not suffer, the bench said. Rerun your programme in tune with this, prepare the data accordingly and furnish the same to us on Friday, the bench told the counsel for the varisities. Permitting the universities to rerun the programme so that data could be obtained to see if the reservation crosses the benchmark of 50 percent, the bench said. The crux of the problem revolves around the meritorious students getting seats at one college and they later sliding to their preferred college. The seat vacated by them and the seat they now occupy are two areas where officials are following different yardsticks since the sliding was done by a reserved candidate who got his seat purely in the merit quota.
BC, SC, ST and Minority Students Federation AP State President J Lakshmi Narasimha told the media that the authorities are doing injustice to the weak by misinterpreting the GO 550 and the HC's stay order.
The bench said it would verify the data on Friday and would come to a conclusion in the matter.