Two dental institutes that requested admission for some students to dental school through the Karnataka High Court have each been fined 1 lakh. According to the court, colleges are not permitted to advocate on behalf of students.
“If the petitioner-students were really deprived of the seats to which they were eligible, they would have approached the Court independently. The colleges cannot step into the shoes of students and file the writ petitions,” the court said. “Precious time of the petitioner-students has been wasted. So also, the petitioners have wasted the Court time for more than half a day, depriving the other genuine litigants,” the division bench of Justice B Veerappa and Justice K S Hemalekha said imposing the cost.
Six students were represented at the HC's request by Sri Venkateshwara Dental College in Bengaluru and KVG Dental College in Sullia. On May 2 and 3, when applicants for BDS (Bachelor of Dental Surgery) programs were required to register and submit payment for the mop-up round of counseling, it was said that the Karnataka Examination Authority (KEA) website was unavailable. However, KEA argued that the registration period for the mop-up round was open on the internet from March 29 to March 31 and that the deadline was then moved to April 1, 2022.
A total of 1,513 students registered themselves during this time. Six students had petitioned, but only one of them had really registered. The colleges did not contest this fact. According to Sri Venkateshwara Dental College, six of the 40 seats in the college are allegedly vacant. Similar claims were made by KVG Dental College, which stated that four of the college's 100 seats were unoccupied. The bench noted that this was the colleges' real motive.
“That is how the colleges have approached the Court to get an order to fill up the vacant post and thus, the exercise of the Colleges is for its personal benefit and not for the benefit of the students.” The court also noted that the addresses of the students who were the joint petitioners were mentioned as ‘care of the respective colleges. “We are bowled over as to how the students come under the 'care of the college of which they are not the students at all. This clearly indicates, only with an intention to fill up the vacant seats, the petitioner-colleges have adopted the indirect method of getting an order from the Court and therefore, have not approached the Court with clean hands.”
Dismissing the petitions, the court said, “Filing and contesting these types of litigation is nothing but wasting precious public time and that of this Court and is nothing but harassing the respondent authorities unnecessarily. Since the petitioners have not come to the Court with clean hands, they are not entitled to any relief before this Court.”
The experience of this Court is that in recent years there has emerged a trend of filing speculative litigations before various Courts of law.
“It is the duty of the Courts to ensure that such litigations shall be weeded out at the first instance rather than allowed to festered and thereby coming in the way of genuine litigants seeking justice treating the Court as a "Temple of Justice" and to protect the precious public and judicial time of the court.," it said.
Source: The Times Of India
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