The Madras High Court on September 24 dismissed a plea seeking quashing of the rank list for admission to MBBS/BDS 2019-20 courses for government and managementquota and conduct fresh counselling.

Justice M Sundar of the court's Madurai bench rejected the petitioners' arguments that seats had not been allocated based on "nativity" certificate. Earlier, four medical aspirants had approached the court with a list of 126 candidates and claimed that they belonged to other States. They also requested the court to declare the rank lists published for 2019-2020 medical admissions in the State under government and management quotas as illegal and to conduct a fresh counselling for both quotas as per the rules prescribed in the prospectus. The judge said the state government was operating 85 per cent nativity quota, both in government and private medical colleges.

Place of residence and nativity were two different concepts and documents submitted by private respondents had been duly scrutinised at the time ofadmission, the judge said. The argument that 85 per cent nativity quota not being made available in private medical colleges "does not hold good for government quota in private medical colleges..." The judge said the petitioners have not made out any case for assailing the rank list published by the Secretary,Selection committee, DME.

"There is no ground to direct the secretary of the selection committee to conduct fresh counselling. The question of deleting the other state candidates had become clearly a non-starter as far as materials before this court is concerned. It is open to the state to scrutinize the affidavits and documents now submitted by private respondents on a case to case basis and apply rules, if the need arises in a given case...," the court added.