High court clears decks for medical college in Kurukshetra town

PERMISSION WAS HELD UP DUE TO ALLEGED PAST TERROR LINKS OF ADESH WELFARE SOCIETY CHAIRMAN

CHANDIGARH: The Punjab and Haryana high court has cleared decks for Muktsar’s Adesh Welfare Society to a 150-MBBS-seat medical college at Shahabad in Haryana’s Kurukshetra district.

The high court bench of justice Rakesh Kumar Jain quashed the Haryana government order of denying permission to the society over the alleged past terror links of its chairman, Dr Harinder Singh Gill, from the militancy times in Punjab. In March 2014, the society, which runs many institutions in Punjab, had got a letter of intent from the government for this project with certain conditions, one which was to obtain essentiality or no-objection certificate from the state government.

In August 2014, the society secured the change-of-land-use certificate for 1.17-lakh square metres, besides approval for building plans. A teaching hospital of 300 beds was also build under the name of Adesh. In August 2014, it applied for essentiality certificate but the government sat over the matter for more than a year and, after court intervention, declined permission in December 2015 based on intelligence inputs that Gill had been involved in terror cases during militancy and could be a “security risk” to the state.

The high court bench ruled the government order as illegal and arbitrary in declining Gill essentiality certificate on the ground of his antecedents. It directed the government to issue the certificate to the society in a month after examining the infrastructure. The bench noted that Gill had quit the primary membership and chairmanship of the society. Health minister Anil Vij and chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar had differed over the matter. After additional chief secretary (medical education and research) KK Khandelwal gave clearance for issuing the certificate, the CM consulted the Haryana advocate general, who stated that permission couldn’t be declined based on antecedents.

The health minister did not accept the recommendation and the matter was again put up before the CM, who sought another legal opinion and, based on it, gave clearance to the certificate. But the society was denied the permission.

The high court also took note of the petitioner’s submissions that Gill was involved in four cases, of which he has been acquitted in one and discharged in two, while the state had withdrawn the fourth. It also noted that the society ran various medical institutes in Punjab, where there was no fresh complaint of this kind against Gill.