The Bombay High Court has refused to permit private engineering and medical colleges to hold entrance tests of their own, ruling that the admission process has to be free of ‘‘profiteering’’.Hearing petitions filed by 11 private colleges against regulation of their fees, a division bench of Justices A.P. Shah and D.Y. Chandrachud yesterday said the admission process has to be transparent and merit-based.‘‘We will not permit individual unaided institutions to conduct Common Entrance Tests of their own, which would create a mess and inconvenience students. The options are to have one CET for the state, as well as unaided professional colleges, or to get an independent agency to conduct a separate CET for all unaided institutions.’’The bench was responding to an argument by V.R. Manohar, the counsel for non-minority unaided medical colleges, that ‘‘the judgement given by the apex court’s bench in the October 2002 case of the TMA Pai Foundation gave unaided private colleges the right to admit students of their choice and form their own fee structure’’.‘‘We should be allowed to submit our own fee structure proposals to a regulatory authority, which can then examine it and fix a maximum ceiling. But we don’t want it, or courts, to tell us what the fees should be,’’ he said.The colleges have challenged the formation of the Educational Institutions Regulatory Authority (EIRA) and Medical Education Regulatory Authority (MERA) to regulate their fees. Advocate-General Goolam Vahanvati submitted that the state is ready to comply by any directive that the court lays down while determining the process for admissions and fee structure.Justice Shah stressed the need to work out an interim arrangement for this year in order to avoid hurting students’ interests. ‘‘If it is agreeable to the parties, for the current year, the admissions could be CET-based. A temporary fee structure could be determined by an independent agency that will receive figure-based recommendations from the colleges,’’ he said.The arguments over the issue of reserving some seats for the ‘‘management quota’’, in which fees are pegged much higher compared to merit-based seats, generated much interest.Justice Chandrachud said the retention of such a quota has been allowed by the apex court only when colleges are deprived of functional autonomy, as a compensation. ‘‘If unaided colleges want to conduct even their own CETs, they shouldn’t insist on retaining the management quota,’’ he said.Counsel C.J. Sawant, representing the deemed-university colleges, justified the retention of such a quota. ‘‘These 15 per cent seats’ fees are much higher than the merit-based seats and save the rest from paying up more towards administrative expenses,’’ he said.
