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Board of Governors in Supersession of Medical Council of India v. National Institute of Medical Sciences and Research & Anr.

Civil Appeal · 2019 INSC 446Decided 1 Apr 2019
Civil Appeal No. 3340 of 2019
Justice L. Nageswara Rao · Justice M.R. Shah

Background

The respondent medical institute had a history of disputes with the medical regulator (the Board of Governors, then in supersession of the Medical Council of India) over whether its M.S. (Orthopedics) and M.D. (Radio Diagnosis) postgraduate courses met required standards, including a five-year bar the regulator had recommended on fresh admissions to those courses and a later notification/corrigendum restricting recognition to specific past batches of students. While a writ petition challenging that corrigendum was already pending before the Delhi High Court, the institute separately approached the Rajasthan High Court seeking a direction for the regulator to inspect its facilities for enhancement of seats for the 2019-2020 academic year. The Rajasthan High Court, without issuing notice to the regulator, passed an urgent interim order directing an inspection within one week, prompting the regulator's appeal to the Supreme Court.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court held that the Rajasthan High Court's interim order was procedurally and substantively flawed: it was passed without hearing the regulator at all, without examining the relevant notification and corrigendum, and would have required a one-week inspection that could not possibly produce an accurate picture of the institute's facilities. The Court also emphasized established precedent that medical college inspections must retain a genuine "surprise element" to be meaningful, which a court-ordered, pre-announced one-week inspection would defeat. Since the institute had already chosen to litigate the underlying dispute over the notification and corrigendum in the Delhi High Court, the Supreme Court held that any further relief connected to that dispute should also be sought there rather than in a second, parallel proceeding in Rajasthan. It therefore set aside the Rajasthan High Court's interim inspection direction and allowed the appeal, without expressing any opinion on the merits of the underlying recognition dispute still pending in Delhi.

Lesson Learnt

Courts are wary of parties pursuing overlapping litigation on the same underlying dispute in two different High Courts, and will not uphold an urgent interim order granted without hearing the other side, particularly where it would undermine a regulatory process, like a surprise facility inspection, that depends on the other party not having advance notice.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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