BAHAWALPUR, April 12: Justice Sheikh Hakim Ali of the Lahore High Court (Bahawalpur bench) dismissed on Monday a joint writ petition of two medical students and declared the orders of the Punjab health minister regarding relaxation of lectures to two others as illegal.

Petitioners Nayyar Abbas and Junaid Saleem, students of MBBS third professional of the Quaid-i-Azam Medical College, were not cleared for supplementary examinations for not completing their requisite percentage of lectures.

In their petition, they submitted that their two classmates, Sulman Arif and Fawad Yousaf, were allowed to take supplementary examination on the directive of the health minister. They requested the learned judge to consider their plea on a par with those two students who had been granted permission.

Dismissing the petition, the judge observed that the order of relaxation in lectures by the minister could not be used as a precedent for the petitioners. He said that an illegal and invalid order could not be used to gain benefit or should be made the basis for obtaining the assistance from this court.

He further observed that the court would rather curb such practices and orders and nip the evil in the bud to ban its creation and implementation in future. Stressing the need of quality medical education, the judge's verdict added that the students of today would be the license-holders of tomorrow and play with the fate of human beings.

The quality medical education would produce a competent doctor while relaxation in the percentage of lectures would bring a bad addition, and as such, lectures percentage requirement was of vital importance to maintain the standard.

If once, he said, lectures relaxation was granted, it would open the floodgate of concessions, which would give birth to nepotism and corruption. He said the consequences of the wrong precedent set from the orders of the health minister could not have good impacts.

Meanwhile, the judge also dismissed another writ petition of Muhammad Ghaus Rana, an electrical contractor, and allowed the general contractors to take part in submission of tenders.

The petitioner had submitted that as he was a diploma-holder in associate engineering from the Board of Technical Education, Lahore, the electrification contracts of government buildings should only be awarded to persons who were duly licensed by the authority concerned.