Nine months after the Supreme Court delivered its ambiguous verdict touching off a raging controversy in admissions to private medical and engineering colleges, it decided to take a second look today. Putting on hold the admission process, the court said that a five-judge bench will deal afresh with the question of ‘‘management quota’’ and ‘‘capitation fee,’’ two issues that are key to the mess and confusion as exposed by The Indian Express in Mumbai. A bench headed by Chief Justice of India V N Khare announced that all the cases related to this subject will be put before the five-judge Constitution bench on July 22. The five-judge bench will, in effect, interpret a judgment delivered by an 11-judge bench on October 31, 2002 in the T M A Pai Foundation case, which liberated professional colleges from governmental controls in the critical areas of admissions and fees. The constitution of a five-judge bench for this purpose is actually a departure from the norm that one bench’s judgment can be interpreted by another bench of at least the same size. But an exception was made in this case clearly because of the systemic strain involved in setting up another 11-judge bench, which is the biggest in the last 30 years. The 11-judge bench verdict created a chaos this academic year because of its loosely worded directions. First, while outlawing the existing system of 85 per cent of the seats being filled by the Government on the basis of a common entrance test, the court gave discretion to each state to fix a management quota on the basis of ‘‘local needs.’’ This led to such extreme diversity that in Kerala the management quota is 75 per cent, while in neighbouring Karnataka it is only 25 per cent. Second, though the court ruled that admissions to the management quota should also be ‘‘merit-based,’’ it failed to lay down any objective criteria to ensure that students are actually selected in a transparent manner. On the contrary, the judgment gave the management the discretion to opt out of the common entrance test and recruit students on its own. A direct casualty of all this chaos has been the court’s prohibition of ‘‘profiteering’’ by the management. This has raised fears around the country that merit has again been replaced by commerce in admissions to private professional colleges, which earlier had a fixed management quota of only 15 per cent. As a corollary, the five-judge bench will address the contentious question whether the state government should be allowed to fix an upper limit on the fees to check profiteering. Another important issue that will have to be untangled concerns the existing reservations for backward classes and the subsidised education that is required to be provided to them despite the liberalisation. The private colleges in Tamil Nadu, for instance, petitioned that such students should not eat into the management quota as it is only 40 per cent in that state. The guidelines issued by the Centre two months ago to help the states implement the T M A Pai Foundation case have also been assailed by private colleges. Their main grievance against the Centre, while interpreting the ruling of the 11-judge bench, suggested a management quota of not more than 25 per cent.
