Judgment

PATHAK, J.:- This Court has hid occasion in the past to entertain the complaints of several young men and women who aspired to admission to the Medical Colleges of their States and had been wrongly denied admission thereto. In the writ petitions and civil appeals now before us, the grievance voiced by the petitioners and the appellants takes us to a new category of cases and to a new dimension. They question the validity of nominations by the State Government of Jammu and Kashmir and the State Government of Andhra Pradesh of candidates to seats reserved in the Medical Colleges of other States. The civil appeals are directed against the judgment dated December 31, 1982 of the Andhra Pradesh High Court dismissing writ petitions filed by the appellants.

2. The Medical Council of India, in its report on under-graduate medical education, recommended that with a view to encouraging national integration, ten per cent of the seats in every Medical Colleges, other than those where admissions were planned on an all India basis, should be reserved, on a reciprocal basis for students from other States. At the Joint Conference of the Central Council of Health and the Central Family Welfare Council, held from December 28, 1977 to January 31, 1978, the matter was considered, and a resolution was passed recommending that five per cent of the seats in Medical Colleges should be reserved for candidates from other States on a reciprocal basis. After protracted correspondence between a number of State Governments, the States of Andhra Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu agreed upon such an arrangement. It was decided that each of them would have the right to nominate candidates to seats reserved in the Medical Colleges of the other participating States. We are concerned here with nominations made by the State Government of Jammu and Kashmir and the State Government of Andhra Pradesh. Twentytwo of the thirty nominations made by the State Government of Jammu and Kashmir for the year 1982-83 have been challenged in these writ petitions and all the nominations made by the State Government of Andhra Pradesh have been assailed in the associated Civil Appeals.

3. The petitioners in the writ petitions and the appellants in the appeals were candidates for admission to the M.B.B.S. course of studies in the Medical Colleges of their respective States, and not having succeeded in that object, they claim that they should have been properly considered for nomination by their State Governments to the seats reserved in the Medical Colleges outside their home States because they have secured higher marks in the qualifying examination than the nominated candidates. They urge that the nominations actually made by the State Governments have been made in their absolute and arbitrary discretion, without reference to any objective criterion, or any controlling norms or guidelines. They also allege that the nominations have been influenced by the personal relationship of the candidates to persons in the ruling political party or to Government officers in positions of high authority.

4. The position taken by the Jammu and Kashmir Government and by the Andhra Pradesh Government is that to serve the objective of national integration the selection of a candidate has to be determined not merely by the marks obtained by him in the qualifying examination but also by his ability to project an appropriate image of the culture of his home State in the State to which he is nominated. It is submitted that no objective criterion is possible in that context, and the selection must perforce be left to the absolute and unfettered choice of the State Government. The Andhra Pradesh Government relies on G. O. M. No. 508, M & H dated July 27, 1979, which brings the scheme into effect from the academic year 1979-80. It expressly provides that the selection of candidates for such nominations is excluded from the purview of the Selection Committees constituted f