SC tells Centre to help Ukraine-returned students get admission to other varsities

The Supreme Court, on Friday, asked the Union government to help Indian students in Ukraine whose studies were affected due to its ongoing armed skirmish with Russia. The top court asked the government to develop a web portal providing details of foreign universities that would allow Indian students, who were in undergraduate medical programmes in Ukraine, to complete their courses.

A bench of Justices Hemant Gupta and Sudhanshu Dhulia told Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, who appeared for the Centre, that the Union government should help Indian students who will now have to go to other countries, under alternative schemes of academic mobility programmes. The bench said the high commissions in the other countries must help the students in all possible ways.

The court said that the government should use its resources to help students.

Listing out measures taken to help the students, Mehta told the court that those who could not do their clinical training after four or five years of their course were allowed to complete it here. It has been ensured that the students will get their degrees from Ukraine, he said.

However, for those in their first, second, or third years, of course, the government had liaised with other countries and Ukrainian authorities for the “academic mobility programme”, the solicitor general told the bench. Under this, such students would be admitted to other foreign countries and degrees would be awarded to them from the parent university in Ukraine, Mehta said.

Having noted that the government had a problem admitting 20,000 students to Indian colleges, the bench asked the government to render all help to the students who would have to go to foreign countries to avail alternative ‘academic mobility programme’.

“Start a web portal, post details like available seats in colleges (alternate foreign universities, which are compatible to admit students from Ukraine), fees etc and ensure they are not fleeced by agents,” the bench said.

In a written response to a batch of petitions, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare had earlier said the medical students who returned from war-torn Ukraine could not be accommodated in Indian universities, in view of the absence of any statutory provision as well as possible damage to standards of medical education in the country.

During the hearing, senior advocate Rajiv Dutta suggested that the Centre should declare 20,000 students who returned from Ukraine as “war victims” as per the Geneva Convention and extend them relief.

The bench, however, orally told the counsel that he should not take it to that level because the students had gone there voluntarily.

Senior advocate Salman Khurshid, appearing for the petitioners, referred to language and fees issues, saying a student who studied in a Ukrainian university might find it difficult to adapt to a Polish university.

The court was miffed with the comment by senior advocate R Basant, who was appearing for another batch of petitioners, who asked why Indian universities couldn’t accommodate students when other foreign universities were doing the same.

“You do not have a right over Indian universities,” the bench said.

The solicitor general sought time to get instructions from the authorities concerned on the suggestions made by the court.

The bench fixed the matter for consideration next Friday.