Clearing the air over admission to this year’s All-India Pre-Medical courses, the Supeme Court today vacated its earlier order asking the government to set apart 10 per cent of the seats for SC/ST candidates.A bench of Justices K G Balakrishnan and D K Jain gave the order, but not before the Centre assured that it would fulfil the quota promise in the coming academic year. ‘‘We will provide reservation for SCs/STs under all-India quota from the next year,’’ Additional Solicitor-General Gopal Subramanian told the bench. Today’s order makes things easy for admission to AIPMGEE this year as an earlier order of the court had asked the Government to set aside 10 per cent seats for SC and ST candidates though the stipulation did not exist at the time of conducting the exam. However, the Government had expressed helplessness to implement the order in the present academic year saying it would open a plethora of litigation from other successful candidates. The Government also promised to come up with a cogent and uniform policy by the next session.Implementing the 10 per cent quota order may also have run counter to a 2005 decision of a larger bench of the SC which said that 50 per cent of PG Medical seats in government colleges should be filled purely on merit. The Centre had fav-oured continuance of the existing procedure followed in the previous academic year, that is, to fill 50 per cent all India quota solely on merit. It had said the pro-rata reservation could be applied to the states, which will fill the rest 50 per cent after carving out the all-India quota.
