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Pendency of cases cause for worry

It was thought provoking to read the news item “HC comes down heavily on lawyers over pending cases” (May 17). The comments on the issue made by the learned judge Justice K. Kannan are extremely legitimate. There is large pendency of cases and the public anger against the court’s inability to dispose of cases is mounting. He has blamed the lawyers’ fraternity for this sorry state of affairs.

My query seeking information under Right to Information Act, 2005, in this regard has not been answered for the last more than two years.

In fact, the serious issue raised by Justice Kannan needs to be debated by various stakeholders in the right perspective in its entirety irrespective of the controversies it may seemingly generate. Necessary reforms should be made at the earliest for the convenience of all, especially the litigants, who suffer the most due to the delays.

GS BHATIA, Mohali

Bad HR management

I agree with Dr Muralidharan's views in the ‘Letters to the Editor’ column (PGI's promotion mantra: Publish or perish, May 21). As former faculty members, we know that PGI promotion interviews are never held on time. The criteria for promotion are not objective. Several deserving candidates are not promoted. I also agree that the importance given to papers must be limited to some objective criteria (10 papers for a Professor, excluding case reports). Other factors like good teacher and good clinical doctor must be given due weightage. Teacher evaluation must be done by the trainees as is done in the West and clinician evaluation must be based on patient feedback.

Dr KL NARASIMHAN, Chandigarh

II

Contrary to popular belief that clinical faculty be evaluated by a 'new' system on the pretext that non-clinical faculty have more time to publish, many argue that majority of clinical departments aren't actually overloaded with work, with many having an OPD/surgery rotation of less than 2 day per week per faculty. Others continue to argue that ‘clinical research’ doesn’t need substantial funding and time hence 'new' evaluation system in PGI will be redundant.

However, a good replacement evaluation system for clinical faculty could indeed include 'number of patients' seen per faculty as a good criteria in addition to obtaining patient and resident scoring (feedback) and publications.

Regardless of the outcome of this debate, the truth of the matter is that excellence or success in any field doesn't wait for evaluation system, it simply seeks to overshadow generality.

Dr AKSHAY ANAND, Chandigarh

III

To get promotion and to justify the promotion, the doctor should divide his time equally among all three spheres-clinical work, teaching and research. None of these three spheres can go alone. The more number of patients one sees, the more material he or she gets to work upon, to teach and then to plan a research.

If one does not have any patients how can one teach and plan research grants. Even the basic departments base their research projects on clinical material and several of these are collaborative projects.

Dr A J KANWAR, Chandigarh

China worth emulating The Badal government gave Rs 1 crore to Yuvraj Singh for his performance in the Cricket World Cup. The lazy man’s game is not a part of the Olympics nor Asian Games or Commonwealth Games. I want to suggest the government to eschew biased treatment. Sportspersons from all fields should be given equal treatment, if we want to earn gold medals in the mother of all international events, Olympics. China was nowhere on the Olympics medal tally a few decades ago and now it has elbowed out all reigning champions like the US, Russia, Japan and Germany. BANSI RAM, Hoshiarpur

Cartoon controversy

When any society is not confident about itself, it witnesses hullabaloo on small issues like cartoons and the offenders are taken to task by wielding muscle or administrative power.

It is indeed shameful that the cartoon, which was not found objectionable either by Jawaharlal Nehru or BR Ambedkar, is being protested by their self-appointed admirers (Rajindar Sachar’s article "Cartoon Controversy", May 17). and the central government too meekly succumbed to their whims and fancies.

Many would be unaware that Hillary Clinton invited cartoonists who produced cartoons depicting her for tea. Instead of boasting about being world's largest democracy, Indians should at first learn to appreciate the essence of democracy from the likes of Hillary Clinton.

KAJAL CHATTERJEE, Kolkata