M RAJESHWARI Vs. STATE OF KARNATAKA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) this is a case in which the government in exercise of its Rule making power for regulating selection to post graduate courses in the medical and dental colleges in the state of Karnataka has on its statute book two rules which not merely conflict with one another but are wholly inconsistent with one another. The result being, that is with respect to the facts of this case the petitioner who had applied for admission to d.g.o. course and had secured 684th rank in the entrance test finds herself left out in the cold because a person who had secured 738th rank having been provided a bearth in the m.d. (pathology) course had chosen to exercise her option subsequently to join the d.g.o. course when a place became vacant because somebody higher up in the merit list did not join the course. The curious position reached is the petitioner having a higher ranking in the merit list does not get a seat at all whereas a person with a lower rank gets actually not one but two places and that is made possible with the amendment made to the Karnataka medical colleges and dental colleges (selection for admission to post-graduates courses) rules, 1987 with effect from 12th september, 1989. Rule 7 of the rules prior to the amendment reads as follows:

(2.) Sri Ravivarma Kumar, learned counsel for the petitioner submitted that sub-rule (la) of Rule 7 of ihe rules apart from violating the fundamental rights of the petitioner guaranteed under Article 15 of the Constitution is a clever subterfuge resorted to and ventured upon by a disingenuous Rule making authority to shepherd candidates with lesser merit to a course through the back door. He points out very pertinently, so long as Rule 11 of the rules contained in the format of the rules as they now stand, it makes the position of the state somewhat debilitated in that in looks as if by resorting to Rule 11 candidates from the waiting list can be picked up when a seat in a particular course becomes available for filling up, but the controller of selection by resorting to Rule 7(1a) of the rules can fit others into vacancies which really had to go to people in the waiting list who had certainly a higher ranking vis-a-vis those who were low down in the ranking the other way. Rule 7(la) enables a student with lesser merit to get a place of his choice by the accidental availability of seat in that parlicular discipline because such option now vests with him under rulc 7(1a).

(3.) the fact that whether it is by design or otherwise, power is available to the selection committee to avail of cither Rule 11 or Rule 7(1a) of the rules in its hands, thus makes a selection made in that manner plumping for this or that depending on the vacancy makes such an exercise wholly invidious. That type of three-wheeling furnishes the high water mark of arbitrariness. Even otherwise Rule 7(la) which enables exercise of an option by a person with lesser merit to claim a scat which could not have gone to that candidate at all in virtue of individual merit but later becomes eligible for the same, transcending the claims of more merilorious candidates by the mere accident of a candidate with interior merit having secured admission in some other discipline in some other college makes the posilion totally indefensible.