The Madras High Court on Tuesday refrained from passing any interim order on a batch of cases challenging the constitutional validity of a law passed by the State Legislature recently for providing 7.5% horizontal reservation for students of government schools in medical and dental admissions.
The first Division Bench of Chief Justice Sanjib Banerjee and Justice Senthilkumar Ramamoorthy said it would not be in public interest to pass an interim order. They, however, agreed to take up all the cases for final hearing after four weeks and directed the counsel concerned to complete their pleadings by then.
The Bench pointed out that the vires of the Tamil Nadu Admission to Undergraduate Courses in Medicine, Dentistry, Indian Medicine and Homeopathy on Preferential basis to Students of Government Schools Act of 2020 had been challenged by a batch of writ petitioners on entirely different grounds. Some petitioners contended that though reservation appeared to have been granted to the economically weaker section, the economics of their weakness had not been worked out. Their essential submission was that a general class had been made out of students attending government schools without making an endeavour to ascertain their real economic condition.
On the other hand, the Tamil Nadu Catholic Educational Association, an umbrella organisation that runs 2,286 government-aided schools in the State, had challenged the law on the ground that it discriminated between wholly government-run and the government-aided private schools. It wanted the reservation to be extended to students of government-aided schools too.
During the course of hearing, senior counsel Rev. Fr. Xavier Arulraj, representing the association, urged Advocate General Vijay Narayan to share a copy of retired High Court judge P. Kalaiyarasan’s report based on which the State government had decided to provide reservation for government school students alone.
The A-G said that the report would be placed before the court and that the counsel could access it.
Published - January 06, 2021 01:17 am IST
