Karnataka High Court has a sought a list of nursing schools in the State that have been recognized or approved by the State government but not the State Nursing Council (SNC) or were to be recommended by the health varsity.
The query came from the Division Bench comprising of Chief Justice Cyriac Joseph and Justice Ram Mohan Reddy in a suo moto Public Interest Litigation (PIL) initiated to deal with the State's nursing institutes which lack basic infrastructure.
During the hearing, counsel for SNC submitted that though the Counsel had approved only 30 nursing schools out of the 360, several institutes had obtained approval after an appeal to the State government.
The Bench which discussed the powers under which government could grant such approval, directed the SNC to file separate lists of nursing schools approved by the SNC and by the government.
Similarly, the Bench directed Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences (RGHUS) to give details of the nursing colleges that might have been recognized only by the government without the University's recommendations.
Around 180 nursing colleges in the state approached the High Court and were impleaded as respondent to the PIL. These were among the 352 colleges whose approval of admissions for the year 2006-2007, the Court had prohibited by an earlier order.
The Court on October 9, 2006 had prevented SNC and RGHUS from approving admissions to these nursing institutes following a report from the CN Gurumurthy Task Force on Paramedical Education that had pointed out on the lack of infrastructure in the nursing colleges across Karnataka.
While considering the management's plea, the High Court had modifies its earlier order. It directed SNC and RGHUS to consider the responses submitted by these institutes to grant provisional approval for admissions, if improvement was found. It also gave then the liberty to take appropriate action according to the law if the conditions were not satisfactory.