Punjab and Haryana High Court (File Photo)
A court can seek medical reports from civil hospitals in cases of conflict over medical examination in defence recruitment, said the Punjab and Haryana High Court. The ruling was given in the case of an Air Force aspirant from Haryana, who had been selected as an airman but later declared unfit on medical grounds.
“The scope of interference in defence matters is ordinarily narrow and restricted. But to argue that medical reports from civil hospitals under court directions has to be ruled out of consideration and reduce them to waste paper would be blocking reason and toeing the Air Force line asininely,” said the High Court. “I do not think it would be fair and just to lay down as an inflexible proposition of law or rule that medical reports of defence authorities in the matter of recruitment are impregnable.”
The 21-year-old petitioner in the case after the medical examination by Air Force doctors had been declared unfit for the post following the discovery of external hemorrhoids in him. Though he later underwent surgery and appealed for revision before Air Force’s Appeal Medical Board in Chandigarh, he was again rejected on the same medical grounds despite being declared “permanently cured” by civil doctors. A team of PGIMER, Chandigarh, constituted on the directions of the court to examine the petitioner later also declared him free of the disease later.
