HYDERABAD: The Telangana Government issued orders on Wednesday, directing Kaloji Narayana Rao University of Health Sciences (KNRUHS) to strictly follow the merit order and change the present procedure for the ensuing counselling for admission into first-year MBBS to benefit the local students. As per the new rule, students need not apply for each round of web counselling like they did earlier. They have to apply only once for all seats in all colleges as per their choice.

This will ensure automatic upgradation of merit students in the 85 per cent local category to 15 per cent unreserved category, depending on the availability of seats in second and subsequent rounds of counselling.

Thereby the seats vacated by meritorious Telangana students in the local category will be filled with Telangana students only as per the new rule.

As per reports in the Deccan Chronicle, two students approached the High Court challenging the earlier ‘faulty’ admission procedure of the health varsity.The admission procedure in question is where the university follows to fill the 15 per cent unreserved quota in the second and subsequent phases of counseling.

In the first phase of counselling, the university will fill the 15 per cent unreserved quota with merit students irrespective of their region and caste. The remaining 85 per cent quota will be filled by Telangana students only.

For the second and subsequent phases, students have to apply for each round of counselling.

When the second phase counselling begins, a few students who were allotted seats in the 15 per cent unreserved quota vacate the seats to join better colleges.

Some local students who got admission to the college of their choice under the 85 per cent local quota could not apply again for the subsequent phases of counseling.

The petitioners stated that the university should prepare the merit list afresh irrespective of the students applying for subsequent phases of counselling because the basic rule is that the 15 per cent unreserved quota shall always contain the most meritorious students.

An expert committee was also formed to look into the admission process and it stated that injustice was meted out to Telangana students who could not secure seats in medical colleges due to a technical procedure in the counseling procedure allowing less meritorious students from Andhra Pradesh to get admissions into Telangana colleges.

With the NEET results announced for the current academic year and the university is all set to take up admissions, taking cognizance of this issue accordingly, the health department issued a GO rectifying the counseling procedure.

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