Resident Certificates Should Be Issued After Careful Scrutiny, Rules HC

HYDERABAD: The Telangana High Court on Thursday directed the state government to instruct tahsildars to be extra careful while issuing permanent resident certificates to students, who utilise them certificates to claim local candidate quota.

A division bench, comprising Chief Justice Alok Aradhe and Justice T. Vinod Kumar, was perplexed on the need to issue resident certificates to students pursuing higher studies in other states.

The court opined that certificates that mention a specific time period of the applicant’s stay in a place cannot be deemed permanent resident certificates.

The court was dealing with a batch of petitions filed by some students seeking directions to Kaloji Narayana Rao University for Health Sciences to consider their resident certificates and make them eligible for local quota. The varsity had refused to give admissions to them under local candidate quota, because their resident certificates were mentioned within a time period.

When this was inquired by the court, A. Prabhakar Rao, counsel for the university, said that resident certificates were issued to candidates who had migrated to Amarvati post-bifurcation. They had studied from Class eight to Intermediate in Andhra Pradesh.

The court observed that it had recently issued orders easing the local rule based on the permanent residence certificate so that no Telangana student will miss out on local candidate quota. But, this was going in another way the court observed and suggested that the tahsildar office should inquire the nativity and study certificates of the candidates before issuing such quota certificates. It directed the Advocate-General B.S. Prasad to alert the government to issue the guidelines to the authorities, who are competent to issue resident certificates.