The Supreme Court heard testimony from a 287th-ranking Institutes of National Importance Combined Entrance Test (INICET) applicant on Monday. The applicant claimed that AIIMS, Delhi, mistakenly treated "institutional preference" to in-house doctors as de facto reservation, which prevented her from securing a postgraduate seat. Instead, the seat went to a 10,721 ranker.

Senior attorney P B Suresh, representing Sukrit Nanda M, informed the bench of Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud, Justices J B Pardiwala and Manoj Misra that the Supreme Court had declared institutional reservation unconstitutional in two of its judgments from 2002 and 2023, but had permitted institutional preference for up to 50% of the seats available in the open category.

In contrast to these decisions, "AIIMS has allocated over 505 of the seats available in certain disciplines (and in some cases even 100% of the seats) to candidates who qualify to avail institutional preference. SC had said that preference could be given to candidates who have undertaken their MBBS studies at AIIMS and not reservation of seats for such candidates", he stated.

The bench sent notifications to AIIMS, Delhi, and the Centre, asking for a response to the plea from them in a week. The request said, "Institutional preference would necessarily mean that all other factors being equal between two candidates, one qualifying for an 'Institutional Preference' would be preferred over the candidate who does not qualify for the same."

The petitioner claimed to have graduated with 20 gold medals from Madras Medical College's MBBS program in 2024 and to be a licensed medical professional. She scored higher than 99.65% of the people who took the INICET, placing her at 287th place with a score of 99.65%.

(Input from various sources)

(Rehash/Priyanka Pandey/MSM)