Thiruvananthapuram: The medical college admission process which was to begin on Thursday has hit a roadblock with self-financing institutions insisting on a final decision on the fee structure.
The two associations of the self-financing medical college managements have written a letter to this effect to the government jeopardising the government's plan to begin option registrations after issuing a notification.
The fee structure decided in the previous year was scrapped by the court. Fee Regulatory Committee headed by Justice Rajendra Babu has not issued an order for a new fee structure.
The option before the state government was to ask the students to sign an affidavit agreeing to pay any fee structure decided by the panel. However, the college managements are not in favour of such an agreement.
Moreover, the government did not want to proceed with the admission process by antagonising the management, said sources.
Thiruvananthapuram: The orders of the committee fixing fee between 2016-17 and 2018-19 were set aside by a division bench of the Kerala High Court. It was while considering a batch of 26 petitions filed by a few private self-financing medical colleges that the court passed the order earlier this year.
The Bench held that the fee orders passed by the committee in the meetings where all its members were not present were legally invalid. No quorum had been prescribed and, therefore, all the members would have to be present, the court said. It was after this court order that the government went for the amendment. Assembly had recently passed the Kerala Medical Education (Regulation and Control of Admission to the Private Medical Education Institutions) Amendment Bill 2019. With the amendment, the ten-member committee chaired by Justice Rajendra Babu was reduced to five.
As per the new decision, the committee is divided into two: one for admission supervision with five members and the other for fee regulation with six members.
