MADURAI: The Madurai Bench of Madras High Court has upheld an order passed by a single judge granting relief to a differently-abled siddha practitioner belonging to a Scheduled Caste community by directing the government to appoint him in the post of Assistant Medical Officer (Siddha).
A bench comprising justices J Nisha Banu and S Srimathy passed the order while hearing an appeal preferred by the Medical Services Recruitment Board, challenging the order passed by the single judge in February 2023.
The petitioner Dr P Palavesakumar had participated in the recruitment conducted for the post in 2017 and scored 57 marks out of 100. However, he was not selected. Claiming that the special reservation policy meant for candidates with disabilities had been wrongly applied by the board, leading to his rejection, Palavesakumar moved the court.
Hearing his plea, the single judge noted that the board had clubbed all differently-abled candidates into one slot. This is not the way to apply the special reservation policy, he observed.
The recruiting agency ought to have applied the 4% horizontal reservation policy meant for differently-abled candidates against each vertical (social reservation quota) category. Though there are other SC candidates who also qualify if the correct method is applied, only the petitioner has approached the court, he had observed and directed the authorities to appoint the petitioner as AMO (Siddha) against the existing general vacancy. But the board challenged the order.
Hearing both sides, the division bench concluded that there is no infirmity in the single judge’s order and dismissed the appeal.