In a rare instance, the High Court of Karnataka has imposed a penalty of ₹8.1 crore on three dental colleges for admitting 81 students to the Bachelor of Dental Surgery (BDS) course in 2015 and 2016 though they had not appeared for the mandatory Common Entrance Test (CET).
The court also directed the students, who were the beneficiaries of admission in violation of the law, to give an undertaking of serving one year in rural service in Karnataka as a condition for approval of their admissions and recognition of their degree by the Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences (RGUHS).
A Division Bench comprising Justice Krishna S. Dixit and Justice P. Krishna Bhat passed the order on the petitions filed in 2015-16 by the colleges and 82 students (one of them was later said to be found to be assessed in CET).
S.B. Patil Institute of Dental Sciences and Research, Naubad, Bidar; the Hyderabad-Karnataka Development Education Trust’s Dental College Hospital and Research Institute, Humnabad, Bidar; and S. Nijalingappa Institute of Dental Sciences and Research, Kalaburagi, and the students had approached the court after RGUHS declined to approve their admissions.
The colleges had admitted these students to the seats that were vacant under the government quota.
The petitioners continued the course during the pendency of the petitions. While some of the students have already completed their course, others will complete it shortly.
The Bench said that “the petitioner-colleges have taken a tangent route in gross violence to the law of the land”. It said their conduct exhibited a recalcitrant attitude i.e. ‘come what may, we will neither obey the rule of law nor the rulings of the highest court of the country’, and this offended law, reason and justice.
“The petitioner-colleges have caused a great deal of anxiety to the innocent students and obviously to their parents too. The time has come to tell that howsoever high you may be, the law is above you. Lawbreaking should be proved to be counter-productive and terribly punitive,” the Bench observed while directing the colleges to pay, to the Chief Minister’s COVID/Calamity Relief Fund within two months, an exemplary cost of ₹10 lakh each for every illegal admission.
On the students, the Bench said it had to come to their rescue and relieve them of the difficulty of not having recognised educational qualifications because of the fault of others, as it had found “no reason to assume that the students or their guardians were hand in glove with the erring management of the colleges”.
However, as the students were beneficiaries of a violation of the law regardless of their “arguable guiltlessness”, the Bench said they needed to render community service.
