Saurabh Malik
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, April 30
Observing that backwardness of an area in Haryana cannot be determined on factors such as infrastructure, inaccessibility or proximity to an urban centre, the Punjab and Haryana High Court has made it clear that socio-economic aspects are required to be taken into consideration.
The ruling came as a Division Bench upheld the state government’s decision to give incentives to in-service doctors who had served in remote and difficult areas.
The ruling by Justice Mahesh Grover and Justice Rajbir Sehrawat came on a bunch of two petitions by Dr Deepanshu and other MBBS doctors desirous of pursuing higher education.
They had questioned the notification dated January 17, identifying 46 blocks in various districts as remote and difficult areas for giving incentives under various schemes of the state government.
Also under challenge was a notification dated January 30, where some community health centres and primary health centres were shown for conferring incentives upon in-service candidates.
Dismissing the petitions, the Bench asserted that the Postgraduate Medical Education Regulations, 2000, gave the state the authority to introduce a scheme of incentives to in-service candidates with a laudable object to ensure representation and service in community health centres and primary health centres in remote and difficult areas where doctors displayed reluctance to go to.
The Bench said the courts would, as such, not sit over the state’s judgment to adopt a scheme of incentivisation, particularly in the absence of any challenge to the scheme or arbitrariness or legal infringement.
The Bench observed that the rationale to identify difficult and backward areas would have to be based on ground realities prevailing in a state and there could never be a uniform yardstick or foolproof method to identify backward areas.
“Considering Haryana as a state equipped with decent infrastructure such as roads etc, it will be difficult to identify a remote or difficult area purely on the basis of available infrastructure and inaccessibility or geographical location and proximity to an urban centre,” the Bench noted.
The Bench further observed, “In such a situation, socio-economic factors play a dominant role in ascertaining the backwardness of a particular area. A casual look at the blocks identified does not really throw up any serious discrepancies so as to discard the entire process altogether.”
The Bench added that while exercising the power of judicial review on the executive’s action, the court was to see whether it suffered from the vice of arbitrariness or reeked of excessive exercise of power or lack of it or was violative of any law.
The Bench asserted that merely because a particular thing could be done differently or even in a better way would be no ground to strike it down altogether.
from The Tribune https://ift.tt/2JIhts5
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