Aastha Thakur
Published on: October 12, 2022 at 20:08 IST
The Bombay High Court maintained the punishment given by the medical college and granted relief to a 28-year-old Mumbai resident who was accused of using a fake Scheduled Tribe certificate to gain admission to an MBBS programme. However, the court did not annul the man’s degree.
The doctor from Mumbai was ordered by the Seth GS Medical College to pay a fine of Rs. 10,93,200. On the other hand, the Maharashtra University of Health Science was instructed to submit a recommendation to revoke the petitioner’s MBBS degree by the Director of Medical Education and Research, Mumbai, on July 17, 2019. This ruling had been contested by the doctor in front of a high court panel that included Justices SV Gangapurwala and RN Laddha.
The petitioner finished a one-year internship in April 2016 after finishing his MBBS degree at Seth GS Medical College in February 2015. After that, in 2017, the petitioner took the NEET-PG and was accepted into the open (General) category for the Post-Graduation Diploma in Ophthalmology, which he finished in June 2019.
The doctor’s counsel, Advocate VM Thorat, claimed that the petitioner was a juvenile when he applied for admission to the MBBS programme with a ST validity certificate.
He further submits that the person in contact with the father of the petitioner, on the basis of his observation stated that the petitioner’s father do in fact belongs to the Tadavi caste covered under the Scheduled Tribe.
Therefore, the person impressed upon the petitioner’s father to claim the MBBS seat under the Scheduled Tribe reserved category.
Thorat said that the petitioner may have secured a seat even under the open category because of their strong performance. However, government counsel Poornima Kantharia said that with that score, the petitioner would not have been able to enrol at Seth Medical Institution but rather would have been accepted into a general category college in Nagpur or elsewhere.
Bombay High Court upholds the doctor’s MBBS degree, which was earned using a false ST certificate.