The Haryana Government’s decision to award weightage in post-graduate medical and dental admission to doctors who have served in remote and difficult areas in the State has hit a roadblock. The Supreme Court on Thursday held the Government’s criteria to identify State’s “remote” areas to be “flawed” and a step taken without preparation in extreme haste.
The State Government had approached the Vacation Bench of the apex court appealing against an order passed by the Punjab and Haryana High Court of May 9, 2017. The HC knocked out the State notification dated May 5, 2017 that identified 68 out of 115 Community Health Centres (CHC) and nearly 54 per cent of the 498 Primary Health Centres (PHC) as “remote”.
The apex Bench of Justices l Nageswara Rao and Navin Sinha said, “The State is first required to identify remote/difficult areas and then analyse the lack of availability of doctors at these locations. To first identify locations where doctors are reluctant to be posted and then classify them as remote or difficult areas is reversing the entire decision making process, akin to placing the cart before the horse.”
The order came as a great reprieve for the candidates who filed petitions before the HC and had won. Senior counsel Indu Malhotra, who represented them, said that the notification came into operation only after the result of the National Eligibility Entrance Test (NEET) was published.
The HC order examined the “haste” with which the authorities acted as a Committee was constituted by the State Government to identify remote areas on May 4. A day later came the report of the committee and the notification was issued the same day. The urgency was due to the first round of counseling due to take place from May 7. The HC noted that even on the date of counseling, the said notification had not been published in the Official Gazette.
Interestingly, since the Committee only had one day to spare, it reproduced the remote areas list contained in a previous notification of September 21, 2005 which was in relation to transfer/postings of State officers. The lack of application of mind was writ large as the HC order showed that 10 “remote areas” were sub-divisions in the Districts while many of the CHCs/PHCs included in the list were located on National Highways and State Highways.
Seeing the conduct of the State, the apex court remarked, “the issuance of notification is based on no data, formulation of the same in a day and implementation before publication in Gazette reflects inadequate preparation by the State, acting more in the nature of a knee jerk reaction to situations.” Cancelling out the first round of counseling held on the basis of the struck down notification, the Bench decided to give another opportunity for the State to bring a better notification. For this purpose, the Court pushed the last date for admissions to June 10.