Bombay HC rejects plea against SEBC quota

Mumbai: The Bombay high court Thursday rejected a petition filed by a group of MBBS aspirants against the state government’s decision to implement reservation for the Maratha community in admissions to medical colleges from this academic year.

A division bench of Justices S.C. Dharmadhikari and Gautam Patel, while dismissing the petition, said that it would pass a reasoned order later. The petitioners said that the Maharashtra State Reservation for Socially and Educationally Backward Classes (SEBC) Act came into force on November 30, 2018, while the admission process for MBBS and dental courses started before that. Therefore, the reservation could not be implemented in the current academic year.

Maharashtra government counsel V.A. Thorat said that it was a policy decision to implement the reservation in the 2019-20 admission process. The 2018 Act granted 16 per cent reservation to the Maratha community by creating the new category of SEBC. However another bench of the high court on June 27, while upholding the Constitutional validity of the Act, asked the government to reduce the 16 per cent quota to 12 per cent in education and 13 per cent in government jobs.

The state contended that the SEBC reservation was on the admission process and not the NEET examination and the NEET exam had been conducted before the Maratha reservation decision.

In May this year, the state government issued an ordinance to provide reservation under the Maratha quota for admissions to medical and dental undergraduate and post-graduate courses from the current academic year itself.