Kochi: Confusion continued to prevail over medical admission in the state with the health department initially giving a direction to the Commissioner of Entrance Examination on Friday to hold admission as per last year’s fees as temporary fees while the private medical managements contested the same.
The argument of the medical managements is that last year’s fee structure cannot be taken as temporary fees as the same had been struck down by the high court. However, sensing the trouble, in a subsequent swift move, the government moved in the day to reconstitute and size down the jumbo admission supervisory and fee regulatory committee headed by Justice Rajendra Babu and convene its meeting on Monday to fix the fees so as to clear the confusion.
According to sources, the health department officials were working late into the night to fix the issues in the medical admission so as to enable the new fee regulatory committee to announce the fees on Monday or Tuesday. Only the other day the bill on medical admission was made into an Act with the Governor signing on it. Following it the process of reconstituting the admission supervisory and fee regulatory committees was started. An official said that only by Tuesday the options from students needed to be called. The Commissioner of Entrance Examinations was unavailbale for comments.
The Division Bench of the Kerala High Court had held that the fee orders passed by the fee regulatory committee in the meeting last year where all its members were not present were legally invalid. It was after this court order that the government went for an amendment and the Assembly recently passed the Kerala Medical Education (Regulation and Control of Admission to the Private Medical Education Institutions) Amendment Bill 2019. As per the new decision, the Justice Rajendra Babu Committee is divided into two: one for admission supervision with five members and the other for fee regulation with six members.
