Telangana HC: Request by PG medical students for exemption from rural services denied 

On Friday, February 3, the Telangana High Court denied a writ petition brought by medical professionals pursuing postgraduate (PG) degrees who sought to be exempt from government service following the completion of their PG degree. The petitioners signed bonds promising to work for the Telangana government for a year after successfully completing their individual postgraduate programmes, and as a result, they were accepted into the PG programme in 2019.

Despite the Telangana Medical Practitioners Registration (Amendment Act, 2013) requiring them to register their names with the Telangana State Medical Council in order to provide rural medical services, the petitioners claimed that an amendment to the act in 2018 waived those requirements. Despite having signed the bonds in 2019, they claimed that they should be exempt from fulfilling the rural service requirement, stated a report in The New Indian Express.

The Telangana Medical Practitioners Registration Act, 1968, was changed, but the state argued that this had no impact on its ability to require rural service as a requirement of residency and that the Act only applied to doctor registrations, not to PG study.

The State made use of both the Supreme Court's decision in Association of Medical Super Specialty Aspirants and Residents vs Union of India and Others and the current rules governing PG studies. In the aforementioned judgement, the Supreme Court supported the right of several states to require bonds for mandatory service. The Telangana High Court's Justice Mummineni Sudeer Kumar rejected their argument and supported the state's position while also taking into account the fact that just seven petitioners had actually appeared in court, while over 890 applicants had stated that they worked in rural areas, as reported by The New Indian Express.