Karnataka High Court holds colleges cannot step into shoes of students and file petitions; imposes costs on 2 dental colleges

Two private dental colleges were saddled with costs of ₹1 lakh each by the Karnataka High Court for wasting the court's timing by filing petition on behalf of students in an attempt to fill up vacant seats in the undergraduate course offered by it for the year 2021-2022 [Sri Venkateshwara Dental College And Hospital vs The State of Karnataka and Ors.]..A bench of Justices B Veerappa and KS Hemalekha said that the petitioners had not approached the Court with clean hands and wasted more than half a day of the court and deprived other genuine litigants of their time.The Court said that colleges cannot approach the Court on behalf of prospective students for the purpose of filling up its vacant seats."The colleges cannot step into the shoes of students and file the writ petitions," the order stated..Colleges cannot step into the shoes of students and file the writ petitions.Karnataka High Court.The colleges, run by the same management, filed the the petitions along with six students, showing the students to be under the "care of" the college even though their admissions had not been finalised. They sought a direction to Karnataka Examinations Authority (KEA) to allow the students to register for mop-up round of admission more than a month after admissions through mop up round were closed. It was contended that the students could not register for the mop-up round held in May 2022 as KEA's portal was inaccessible..The Court questioned how the students came under the care of the colleges of which they were not students at all and concluded that the colleges had approached the Court with an intention to fill up vacant seats, The bench, therefore, said that the colleges had not approached the court with clean hands."We are bowled over as to how the students come under the 'care of' the college of which they are not the students at all. This clearly indicates, only with an intention to fill up the vacant seats, the petitioner No.1-colleges have adopted the indirect method of getting an order from the Court and therefore, have not approached the Court with clean hands," it stated.Further, it stated that if the petitioner-students were really deprived of the seats to which they were eligible, they would have approached the Court, independently and added that the colleges could not step into the shoes of students."But that is not the case in the present writ petitions. The colleges cannot step into the shoes of students and file the writ petitions," the Court made it clear. Therefore, it held that the colleges not only wasted the court's and the petitioner-students' time, but also unnecessarily drove the KEA and other statutory authorities to courts forcing them to incur expenses on unnecessary litigation. The Court also highlighted the recent trend of filing speculative litigations before courts of law and stated that it has a duty to weed out such litigation."It is the duty of the Courts to ensure that such litigations shall be weeded out at the first instance rather than allowing to be festered and thereby coming in the way of genuine litigants seeking justice treating the Court as "Temple of Justice" and to protect precious public & judicial time of the court," the order said.The petition was, therefore, dismissed with costs which were directed to be paid to Advocates' Association, Bengaluru.The State of Karnataka and The Directorate of Medical Education (DME) were represented by Additional Government Advocate Laxminarayan.Advocate NK Ramesh appeared for KEA.Advocates Aditya Bhat and GS Bhat appeared for Dental Council of India.Central Government Standing Counsel VC Sudeep appeared for Directorate General of Health Services.Advocate Sumana Baliga appeared for The Karnataka State Dental Council.Advocate Ashok N Nayak appeared for Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Science..[Read Order]