Early Times Report
SRINAGAR, Mar 31: The High Court has come down heavily on government for "outright unfairness" in providing benefit to a doctor leading to litigation between the two doctors and affecting the patient care.
"Having gone through all these (five) petitions and the documents placed on them, I am constrained to observe, at the very outset, that the two Doctors have been litigating in the Court for the last eight years and the whole mess has been created by the surreptitious conduct of certain persons in the Government in the Health and Medical Education Department," a bench of Justice Ali Mohammad Magrey observed while disposing a bunch of clubbed petitions. "Someone there, under a well planned design to tamper with normal course of things, has been instrumental in throwing the established law and Rules to winds, which has not only given rise to severe multiplicity of litigation between two persons belonging to a noble profession, but has also, in some sense and way, unsettled things settled long before by established law, and left serious repercussions thus far on the service career and functioning of the concerned doctors," the court said.
Consequently, the court said, it must have also impacted the students and patient care in Government Medical College Hospital or the Super Specialty Hospital, Jammu.
"What is curious enough is that the Government is not even ashamed of its outright unfairness exhibited by it by its double standards at two different stages of the litigation- one while defending its action of conferring an undue advantage, unknown to law, on one of the Doctors and then defending its action when such undue advantage was reversed by it," the court said, adding, "It is disgusting that the Government in the Health and Medical Education Department has stooped so low as to manipulate things without any basis."
The case pertains to two doctors who are vying for the post of lecturer in the discipline of Medicine in the Health & Medical Education Department.
The post was filled up by a "general category" candidate. Dr. Shoket M. Chowdhary. Dr. Vijant Singh Chandail (petitioner), figured as the first candidate in the order as a general category candidate and Dr Chowdhary, figured as the last candidate as a ST category candidate. Both were appointed pursuant to advertisement notice no.14-PSC of 2009 dated 17.07.2009. |
