Bengaluru: When the Supreme Court introduced the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) for the admissions to MBBS and post-graduate medical courses it was expected that new system would eliminate the two evils of seat blocking and capitation fees in medical education sector.
But contrary to expectations, the ongoing admission process to the MBBS course in various deemed universities and private consortiums have proved that NEET alone cannot solve the problem.
The IT raid, two days earlier, on the residence of a trustee of a private medical college, which resulted in the recovering of huge amounts of cash, proved that even though NEET has been made compulsory for medical admissions, the problem of donation is very much alive. But industry insiders feel that most of the medical colleges of the state had collected huge sums in the form of cash even though the NEET score-card was made compulsory for the NRI/ Management quota students.
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Here is the best example. On Wednesday, tens of students who had applied for seats in the Association of Minority Professional Colleges in Karnataka (AMPCK) medical colleges alleged that they were denied seats even though they had scored well and were also eligible for reservation.
“Complaints like allocation of dental seats instead of MBBS seats and allocation of seats in non-preferred colleges were rampant. On Thursday some students had raised the issue with the state medical education department,” said an officer from the Karnataka Examination Authority (KEA).
According to students and experts, the only solution for all these problems was to hold just one state-wide admission counselling. “In Madhya Pradesh, the state government is only filling up the seats available in the private medical colleges and the deemed universities. But in Karnataka, as medical colleges are run by either politicians or powerful people, we cannot expect such a radical decision,” said Shashank Patil, who missed an MBBS seat in a private college due to alleged malpractices.
Late admission: Students find their marks cards blocked
Many students who were allotted medical seats by the Karnataka Examination Authority (KEA) under the All-India Quota (AIQ) and the government quota seats in the recently sanctioned medical colleges including the Sambhram Institute of Medical Science (SIMS) are facing a strange problem. They are not able to join the MBBS courses in the colleges they were allotted as they didn’t have the original marks-cards.
According to the students who had lodged complaints with the KEA in this regard, the colleges in which they were admitted earlier were not giving them their original marks-cards.
Issue: According to KEA sources, these students had joined the engineering courses a few weeks earlier under the government quota seats category in private engineering colleges, assuming they would not get MBBS seats. But now they have secured MBBS seats under various categories.
But the engineering colleges where they had got admissions earlier were refusing to issue their original marks-cards saying that it would cause a big loss to them.
Students want CID probe
Parents, students and experts are confused by the state government’s inaction with regards to the allegation of corruption in the ongoing medical admission process. They want the state government to order a CID investigation into the whole seat allotment process.
According to the students, who attended the seat allotment counselling conducted by various deemed universities and consortiums, there was no transparency in the process. “There was no response to the issues raised by the aspiring students. Most of the institutes conducted the seat allotment process simultaneously and this lead to confusion. In the absence of any online data, we were not even able to check what was happening,” said a student who had come to the KEA office in Malleswaram to lodge a complaint with the Admission Overseeing Committee headed by Justice R Gururajan.
“We hope that at least by next year, the state government would not allow private managements to hold the admission process separately. Instead a centralized admission process would seem to be the only solution.” she said.
A parent informed that September 30 was the last date for the medical admissions. “Even if we raise objections we are not sure of getting justice,” he said.
