New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that families of private doctors and health professionals who lost their lives while performing Covid-19 duties cannot be excluded from the Centre’s Rs 50 lakh insurance scheme.
A bench of Justices P.S. Narasimha and R. Mahadevan delivered the ruling in an appeal filed by the widow of Dr B.S. Surgade, a private practitioner who succumbed to Covid-19 in June 2020 after keeping his clinic open during the lockdown.
The Bombay High Court had previously dismissed her plea for benefits under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana Package (PMGKY), holding that Dr Surgade’s work was not officially “requisitioned” as Covid duty.
Holding that families of doctors and health professionals cannot be deprived of the insurance scheme on the basis of a hyper technical reading of “formal” requisition orders, the apex court observed that the extraordinary circumstances at the onset of the pandemic must be read in context and cannot be reduced to a demand for individual appointment letters.
Noting the Centre’s order launching the PMGKY insurance and municipal orders directing dispensaries to remain open, the Justice Narasimha-led Bench said the regulatory and executive matrix “were intended to leave no stone unturned in requisitioning the doctors and the insurance scheme was equally intended to assure doctors and health professionals in the front line that the country is with them”.
While discarding a hyper-technical test for requisitioning, the Supreme Court made clear that entitlement under the PMGKY remains case specific.
“Once we have decided that there was a ‘requisition’, the applicability of the insurance policy will then depend upon actual evidence. (I)f there is clear evidence that the deceased lost his life while performing Covid-19-related duties, the policy will have to be applied,” it said.
“We have already indicated that our enquiry is confined to determining the question as to whether there is ‘requisition’ of the services of doctors and health professionals. We are not examining the credibility of individual claims. It is for the concerned offices or agencies to look into individual claims on the basis of clear evidence,” the apex court said.
It clarified that the onus to prove that a deceased lost his life while performing a Covid-19-related duty is on the claimant, and the same “needs to be established on the basis of credible evidence”.
In its judgment, the apex court acknowledged the unprecedented strain the Covid-19 pandemic placed on the global healthcare system. Despite this immense pressure, the Justice Narasimha-led Bench observed: “Our doctors and health professionals rose as unwavering heroes, turning challenges into courage.”
(IANS)
