Quota row halts appointment of docs in AIIMS

NEW DELHI: A seemingly innocuous quota controversy has stalled the appointment of 106 senior resident doctors in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) with the health ministry asking the institute to seek legal opinion on the issue.

The successful candidates, who hold MD or MS degrees and would have been part of the 490-strong resident doctors forming the backbone of the hospital services in the premier institute, would now have to wait.

The appointments were put on hold by the ministry after member of the AIIMS recruitment body wrote a letter to health minister Anbumani Ramadoss, complaining against the floating reservation policy in recruitment and keeping the single seat vacancies outside the purview of reservation.

Dr Sunil Chumber, in his June 30 letter, said there was a need to review the results as through the present recruitment policy AIIMS is unable to ‘‘demonstrate’’ its commitment to giving reservation.

After receiving the letter, the ministry asked AIIMS to seek the opinion of a senior law officer of the Centre and ordered that the appointment of resident doctors — 69 from the general category, 13 from OBCs, 9 from SCs and two from STs — be kept in abeyance.

Dr Chumber opposed the 24-year-old ‘floating reservation policy’, which was evolved by the governing body of the institute in 1983 keeping in mind that applying quota for vacancies in different faculties mostly resulted in not finding backward class candidates and the seats remaining unfilled.

Barely six months ago on December 30, 2006, Dr Chumber dutifully attended a meeting to finalise the modalities of recruitment of senior residents for the July 2007 session and signed the minutes of the meeting which stated that ‘‘the reservation of seats will be made on floating basis’’.

From the records it is borne out that he also signed the list of successful candidates who were chosen by applying the floating reservation policy.

Immediately thereafter, and despite being aware of the governing body’s decision in 1983, Dr Chumber wrote to all concerned, including Ramadoss, ‘‘Only AIIMS claims to have floating reservation but this form of reservation is not mentioned anywhere in the GOI guidelines.’’

His other opposition to single-post vacancies being not brought under the purview of quota also runs counter to the Supreme Court judgment of 1998.

In the case pertaining to PGI, Chandigarh, the SC had ruled: ‘‘In a single-post cadre, reservation at any point of time on account of rotation of roster is bound to bring about a situation where such a single-post in the cadre will be kept reserved exclusively for the members of backward classes and in total exclusion of general members of the public.