The Supreme Court today, in an interim order, allowed resumption of medical counselling for NEET-PG admissions for the year 2021-22, and upheld the validity of 27 per cent OBC and 10 per cent EWS quotas.
A bench of Justices DY Chandrachud and AS Bopanna said that detailed reasons for the interim order would follow and the counselling for the NEET-PG for the academic year 2021-22 would proceed as per the criteria already notified.
The bench said that validity of criteria of Rs 8 lakh for determination of EWS for future years would be subject to final adjudication of the batch of petitions and listed the pleas for final hearing on March 5.
The bench given this verdict accepting the recommendaitons of Ajay Bhushan Pandey Committee. The Committee, also comprising Member Secretary ICSSR V K Malhotra and Principal Economic Advisor Sanjeev Sanyal.
This was set up to analyse feasibility of the Rs 8 lakh limit after the SC in previous hearings sought to know what exercise was undertaken before fixing the limit. The committee recommended to retain the Rs 8 lakh limit for NEET-PG (AIQ) for the current admission cycle and to adopt recommendations on how to apply the income limit from the next admission cycle.
The bench had pointed out that Rs 8 lakh was also the limit fixed for the OBC quota, and said people from that community “suffer from social and educational backwardness” but “under the Constitutional scheme, the EWS are not socially and educationally backward”. Therefore, by having a similar scheme for both, “you are making unequals equals”, it had said.
