The Karnataka High Court has ruled that a nursing college in Kalaburagi was “playing with the careers” of first-year BSc students and ordered the college to pay compensation of Rs 10 lakh each to ten petitioners (students). The court also instructed the Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Science to initiate criminal and administrative action against the institute.
The issue originated in 2022 when the details of ten students studying first-year BSc at Mother Mary College of Nursing in Kalaburagi were not uploaded on the government’s official admission portal. Consequently, their admissions were rejected, but the college failed to take appropriate action.
In January 2023, the college and the ten students approached the high court seeking directions for the medical education department to allow the uploading of their details on the web portal and issue registration numbers to the students. They also requested permission to appear for their first-year BSc Nursing examination, scheduled to begin on February 13, 2023.
Justice Suraj Govindaraj, presiding over the case, criticized the college for playing with the lives of the students and their parents. He noted that the college had collected fees from the students, inserted their names in the admission register, and failed to upload their data on time. As a result of the Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Science’s refusal, the students would be unable to take their exams this year.
The court held that it could not direct the university to accept the college’s fraudulent actions. Therefore, the college was ordered to compensate the students monetarily, although the judge acknowledged that this might not fully alleviate their losses. The judge also ruled that appropriate authorities, including the police, should investigate the college’s actions for potential fraud and take necessary legal and administrative actions.
The college attributed its inability to upload the students’ details to technical glitches. However, the Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Science claimed that during an inspection, several irregularities were found in the admission register maintained by the college.