Supreme Court Allows Pharmacy Council Of India To Consider For 2023-24 The Applications Received For New Colleges

The Supreme Court allowed the Pharmacy Council of India's (PCI) application seeking permission to consider for the next academic year 2023-24 the applications received for the establishment of new pharmacy colleges.  The matter was heard by a bench comprising Justice BR Gavai and Justice Vikram Nath.

On September 15, 2022, the Supreme Court, while approving the High Court judgments which set aside the 5-year moratorium imposed by the PCI on the opening of new pharmacy colleges, had directed the authority to process the new applications. The PCI sought permission to consider these pending applications for the next academic year.

The Solicitor General of India Tushar Mehta appeared for PCI with Advocates Somiran Sharma and Rana Prashant. The application in question sought extension in time schedule laid down by the Supreme Court via its judgment dated 13.12.2012 wherein a time schedule for approval process of institutions, grant of admission and completion of admission process was laid down. As per the judgement, the last date of granting or refusing approval by the authorities was not to be later than 10th April of the relevant year, and the appeals, if any, were supposed to be submitted by 30th April of the relevant year.

The application provided for details of previous years where the court had extended the deadline. It added that this year, due to an extraordinary situation, an extension was required.

While stating that the applicant was constrained by limited resources and the applications which needed to be processed and disposed of were large in number, the application also highlighted that there were several holidays falling in the month of October such as Dussehra, Diwali, bhai dooj, Govardhan Puja etc. Due to the same, the applicant submitted that number of working days had reduced. Thus, there were issues in respect of availability of human resources including difficulties in availability of inspectors, availability of officers in PCI office, closure of other institutions due to festivals etc. The applicant further submitted that in October 2022, the PCI online portal got blocked and thus the applicant could not carry out any work related to processing of applications as all the documents related to institutions were only available on the portal in digital mode. 

As per the applicant, since the portal was not functioning, all the work had to be done manually and with limited number of staff. This was taking a lot of time and it was impossible to hire trained manpower in such a short time for completion of approval of applications for the academic year 2022-23.

Accordingly, considering the exigencies and extraordinary situation, PCI requested to be allowed to process the pending applications for the next academic year that is, 2023-2024. The same was allowed by the court.

CASE TITLE: PARSHAVANATH CHARITABLE TRUST & ANR. v. ALL INDIA COUNCIL FOR TECH. EDUCATION & ORS.

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