Supreme Court: Uday U. Lalit, J. delivering the judgment for himself and Deepak Gupta, J. set aside the order of Punjab and Haryana High Court which passed the interim direction of allowing admissions to MBBS course in respondent College, pending adjudication of the writ petition.
Medical Council of India in its recommendation to the Central Government had denied the grant of renewal permission to the respondent for admitting students for the academic year 2018-19. There were findings of numerous deficiencies even after multiple inspections. The respondent College applied to the Central Government for grant of a personal hearing which was denied. Aggrieved thus, the respondent filed a writ petition before the High Court which vide the impugned order granted interim direction to allow the intake of admissions for the session 2018-19. The appellant challenged the said order.
The Supreme Court considered all the facts and found that physical inspection of the respondent Medical College was undertaken by the Medical Council of India multiple times. The deficiencies pointed out in the initial inspection were still persisting. In face of repeated failure on part of the respondent-College to remove deficiencies, no permission to take admissions for the current session could have been granted unless on physical verification everything was found to be in order. The Court also observed that in case the certificate of the respondent will be cancelled, the future of the students already admitted for the current session will be uncertain. Further, while granting any interim relief very cautious approach needs to be adopted. It may be possible to expedite the process of verification in a given case, but to allow provisional admissions and make them subject to the result of the petition may entail tremendous adverse consequences and prejudice to the students. It was held that the High Court was not justified in passing interim directions and permitting the Respondent-College to go ahead with provisional admission. Therefore, the appeal was allowed and the impugned order was set aside. [Medical Council of India v. N.C. Medical College and Hospital, 2018 SCC OnLine SC 664, decided on 04-07-2018]