HC upholds MCI action on medical admissions

Hyderabad: A two judge bench of the High Court at Hyderabad comprising Justice Ramesh Ranganathan and Justice M Satyanarayana Murthy on Wednesday refused to interdict the decision of the Medical council of India (MCI) in deleting MD (Biochemistry) from eligibility into admission in the super-specialty course of Doctor of Medicine (DM) in Endocrinology as arbitrary and illegal.

The bench dismissed a writ plea filed by Dr P Harsha Vardhan and others seeking such declaration. A postgraduate degree in Paediatrics, General Medicine or Biochemistry was prescribed as qualifying subjects prior to the impugned amendment. The petitioners contended that they chose Biochemistry in the hope of taking up a post doctoral course and the exclusion derailed their professional plans.

The MCI justified its action contending that it had constituted a Speciality Board to re-examine the eligibility criteria for admission into various super specialty courses and based on the recommendations the said decision was arrived at. Dismissing the writ petition Justice Ramesh Ranganathan said: Discrimination was the essence of classification and would do violence to the constitutional guarantee of equality only if it rested on an unreasonable basis.

It was, therefore, incumbent on the petitioners to show that the classification of students into those who held a postgraduate medical degree either in Medicine or Paediatrics, and those who held a postgraduate medical degree in Biochemistry, was unreasonable and bore no rational nexus with its purported object,” the bench then went on to detail the various parameters.

“As long as the broad features of the categorisation are identifiable and distinguishable, and the categorisation is reasonably connected with the object targeted, Article 14 does not forbid such a course of action.”

On the question of whether the said students satisfied the eligibility and as to whether the expert body had erred in the exclusion, Justice Ramesh Ranganathan said, “The Court lacks the expertise to examine academic policies and would, ordinarily, abide by the opinion of experts. Courts should be slow to interfere with the opinions expressed by experts, and must leave such decisions to those who are more familiar with such problems, than the Courts generally can be”.