Chennai: Thousands of govt doctors get reprieve

Chennai: In a major relief to thousands of government doctors, whose transfer/posting/promotion counseling was stalled due to interim orders, the Madras high court has vacated its earlier interim orders and directed the authorities to recommence the counseling exercise for the present year immediately and complete the same on the basis of the recommendations of the committee within three weeks.

Disposing of a batch of 62 petitions from doctors, Justice V.Parthiban said as far as doctors who already participated in the counselling are concerned, who were not affected by the challenges, consequential orders were not issued in view of the interim orders passed by this court, it is now open to the authorities to go ahead and issue appropriate consequential orders.

The entire litigation has its present origin when the government has issued an order dated February 15, 2019, sanctioning the posts department wise and colleges wise as per the norms of the MCI in Tamil Nadu Medical Service including teaching posts in Directorate of Medical Education. The government by the said order has taken a comprehensive decision in regard to streamlining of transfer/posting/promotion of doctors belonging to various categories of posts of medical officers in the state. Pursuant to the GO, a circular was issued on May 24, 2019, in regard to specialty transfer counselling for medical officers in the cadre of Assistant Professor /Senior Resident /Tutor /Junior Resident who were under the control of the DME in Tamil Nadu Medical Service. The counselling was scheduled to be held between May 30 and June 6. The doctors who were aggrieved by circular have filed number of petitions and the judge had on June 4 granted the interim orders (injunction). However, after the judge suggested forming a committee, the government formed a committee, which after receiving objections from the stakeholders submitted a report. However, when the cases came up for hearing on August 14, counsels including G.Sankaran, appearing for the petitioners had expressed certain reservations about the overall recommendations of the committee.

 The judge said this court has gone through the recommendations and find that the Committee has considered the objections of the doctors objectively by taking into consideration the ground realities in the matter of transferring, posting and promoting the doctors belonging to different posts/categories with a paramount view of upholding the interest of patient care. From the recommendations, as found in the report of the committee, this court finds that the committee has come up with equitable criteria which cannot be faulted with by giving undue consideration to certain individual grievances of the doctors, the judge added.

 The judge said according to the committee's report, this was the first time such revamping exercise has been done in the medical administration of the state in line with the norms fixed by the MCI. When such exercise was undertaken in order to overhaul the cadre restructuring in the medical service, it may give rise to certain teething issues/problems. But such problems cannot be magnified by the so-called aggrieved individual doctors in order to stall the entire process of the counseling for this year.

Any exercise of restructuring of cadre and revamping of the medical administration, the effect of revamping or restructuring will always affect a miniscule group of individual doctors, but that by itself cannot give rise to challenge by those individual doctors and seek to derail the entire process of counseling exercise to be undertaken by the government for this year. In fact, as per the report of the committee, 95 percent of the qualified doctors whose posts and qualifications were not in dispute would get promotions. The aggrieved per centage of the doctors in the state was only 5 percent. Therefore, at the instance of such a wafer-thin group of doctors, the transfer/posting/promotion of the medical officers cannot be kept in abeyance, the judge added.