Chennai: The Madras high court on Tuesday ordered the maintenance of a status quo in the matter relating to the appointment of Director, Jawaharlal Institute of Post-Graduate Medical Education and Research (Jipmer) in Puducherry.
Justice T. Raja ordered maintenance of a status quo for a week, on the petitions from Dr Raveednran and five others, challenging the selection process for the post of director, Jipmer, pursuant to the notification dated November 18, 2017.
Senior counsel P. Wilson appearing for the petitioners submitted that though the petitioners were fully qualified, as the notification, inviting applications, the outgoing director Dr Subhash Chandra Parija had recruited deputy director (Admn) Dr D.K. Patro as the scrutinising authority and directed him to impose a condition that the candidates must send in only articles/publications indexed in an American indexing service called PubMed. Dr Patro sent e-mails to the petitioners requesting them to send their articles/publications listed in PubMed only. This condition was totally illegal since the 2017 notification did not impose any restriction on the indexing service in which articles were published, Wilson added.
Wilson said the condition has been imposed only because Dr Negi whom Dr Patro and Subash Chandra Parija want to appoint as Director has a lot of publications in PubMed, whereas the other petitioners who were all senior members of the Jipmer faculty and far senior to Dr Negi have publications in other indices only.
The director was promoting Dr Negi to safeguard himself since there were serious corruption charges pending against him as on date and he wants to ensure that his successor shields him from any prosecution that may follow, Wilson added.
