The Supreme Court has directed the Centre and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi, to notify in advance, at least by August 15 every year, outstation students on the grant of admissions to MBBS and BDS courses under the central quota.

A bench of Justices L. Nageswara Rao and Hemanta Gupta passed the direction while extending the August 31 annual deadline for MBBS admissions to September 7 for a student from Iran, Arefeh Chegeni, and six other foreign nationals as a gesture on account of the delay caused by the authorities in intimating them about the grant of admission. The government informed the foreign students only a day before the deadline was to end.

The authorities had earlier refused to grant them admission on the ground that they were bound by an apex court judgment in 2015 wherein it was laid down that the entire admission process for undergraduate medical courses should be completed by August 31.

While AIIMS counsel Dushayant Parashar strongly defended the action of the authorities, saying the foreign students should have sought admission before the August 31 deadline, advocate Raj Kumar Gupta, appearing for Chegeni, accused the bureaucracy of bungling.

Gupta told the court that this year the government had in April invited applications from 69 developing countries for sending their candidates for admission to the MBBS course under the self-financing scheme.

Besides Chegeni, two candidates from Bhutan and four from Nepal were selected for the course through a government letter dated August 30, 2019. When Chegeni and the six others approached AIIMS for admission on September 2, they were denied entry on the ground that the deadline was August 30.