The Madras High Court on Friday directed the National Medical Commission (NMC) to take a relook into an office memorandum issued by it on February 3 insisting that the fee for 50% of seats in deemed to be universities and self-financing medical colleges must be on a par with the fee collected by government medical colleges in the respective State or the Union Territory.
Chief Justice Munishwar Nath Bhandari and Justice N. Mala said, the NMC must revisit the memorandum since certain aspects such as the possibility of many seats going vacant in the other 50% due to high fees had not been considered. Ordering that the reconsideration must be done at the earliest, the judges said, till then, the existing fee structure shall continue.
The Bench however upheld the constitutional validity of Section 10 (1)(i) of the National Medical Commission Act of 2019 under which the office memorandum had been issued. The provision empowers the NMC to frame guidelines for the determination of fees and all other charges in respect of 50% of seats in private medical institutions and deemed to be universities governed under the provisions of the NMC Act.
