In the case of Nilay Gupta vs Chairman NEET PG Medical and Dental Admission/Counselling Board 2020 and Principal Govt. Dental College and Ors.(Civil Appeal No. 3345/2020), the Supreme Court of India made the following observations:
- It is evident that the NRI quota is neither sacrosanct, not inviolable in terms of existence in any given year, or its extent. However, if a medical college or institution or, for that matter, the state regulating authority, such as the board in the present case, decide to do away with it, reasonable notice of such a decision should be given to enable those aspiring to such seats to choose elsewhere, having regard to the prevailing conditions.
- This court is of the opinion that a special counselling session should be carried out by the board, confined or restricted to the seats in respect of which admissions were made pursuant to the single judge’s directions. In this counselling session, the board should ensure participation of the concerned colleges; the counselling shall be a limited one, confined only to the number of seats offered and filled as a result of the single judge’s judgment. Such seats shall be offered to the NRI applicants solely on the basis of merit; the seats vacated by such merited students (in the other disciplines) shall then be offered to the beneficiaries of the single judge’s orders. If for any reason, such students (i.e. lower down in NRI merit, who are offered seats in other disciplines) do not wish to take up the offer, the college concerned shall refund the fee collected from such student
- This court clarifies that the validity of deletion of the NRI quota altogether, by colleges, and their “merger” as part of the larger management quota, was not questioned as a general proposition; the premise on which the parties argued their cases was that the NRI quota is inflexible and cannot be altered.
- The time within which an institution decides to do way with the quota during an ongoing investigation process has not been prescribed inasmuch as the observations as to unfairness in the nature of the deletion is in the specific circumstances of this case.