Minority colleges told to hold special round of counselling

The High Court on Monday directed the Association of Minority Professional Colleges in Karnataka (AMPCK) to conduct special round of counselling for linguistic minority medical students and to complete the process by September 30.

A division bench comprising Justice Jayant Patel and Justice Aravind Kumar also passed an order directing AMPCK to give priority to the linguistic minority students during counselling and said students can challenge their allocation of seats if they are not happy. A batch of petitions have been filed by students with their mother tongue as Tulu, Telugu, Tamil and Kodava seeking medical seats in six linguistic minority medical colleges in Karnataka. AMPCK, which conducts counselling, had denied seats to over 50 linguistic minority students saying they have not submitted enough documents to prove their minority status. The petitioner's advocate Ajay Kumar Patil has contended that the website of AMPCK allows documents size of only 100 KB, hence the students were not able to upload all the documents on the website. Though the students had also sent hard copies of the documents, their names were never mentioned in the merit list.

The students had sought direction to prohibit AMPCK from conducting counselling and to hand over the counselling to Karnataka Examinations Authority.