Pt. Parmanand Katara v Union of India (1989)

Module I asks what the right to health under Article 21 actually obliges anyone to do. Katara gives the sharpest answer available on the individual level: it converts the constitutional right into a duty that binds every doctor personally, in a Government hospital or in private practice, and it fixes the order of priorities in an emergency — treatment first, police formalities afterwards.

It is therefore the case for every problem in which a hospital turns an accident victim away because it is a police case, or because it is not the hospital "authorised" to take medico-legal cases. It is also the constitutional parent of the statutory duties that now exist: the driver's duty to take the injured to a doctor and the registered practitioner's duty to attend immediately without waiting for procedural formalities (Motor Vehicles Act 1988, s. 134(a)), and every hospital's duty to give free first aid or treatment to victims of rape and acid attack (BNSS 2023, s. 397, refusal being punishable under BNS 2023, s. 200).

The petitioner, a human-rights activist, moved the Supreme Court under Article 32 on the strength of a newspaper report headed Law helps the injured to die. A scooterist had been knocked down by a speeding car. A passer-by took him, bleeding profusely, to the nearest hospital. The doctors there refused to attend to him and told the man to take the patient to another hospital about twenty kilometres away, which was authorised to handle medico-legal cases. The victim died before he could reach it.

Before the Court, the Medical Council of India relied on clauses 10 and 13 of its Code of Medical Ethics and said that the formalities of criminal procedure should not stand in the way of attending to an injured person. A committee chaired by the Director-General of Health Services had already decided that all Government hospitals should give immediate medical aid in all cases, medico-legal or not, and that a patient may be referred onward after primary aid if the required expertise or facilities are not available where he reports; zonalisation of hospitals, it decided, applies only to cases brought in by the police. The Union of India stated that nothing in the penal law, the criminal procedure law or the Motor Vehicles Act prevented doctors from promptly attending to seriously injured persons before the police arrived.

The Court held that Article 21 of the Constitution casts the obligation on the State to preserve life, and that every doctor, whether at a Government hospital or otherwise, has the professional obligation to extend his services with due expertise for protecting life. Preservation of human life is of paramount importance, because once life is lost the status quo ante cannot be restored. No law or State action can intervene to avoid or delay that obligation; in the Court's words it is total, absolute and paramount, so procedural laws which would interfere with it must give way.

Oza J, concurring, emphasised that there is no legal impediment to a doctor attending an injured person at once; that doctors should not be unnecessarily harassed by the police or by courts; and that a doctor should not be summoned to give evidence unless it is necessary, nor kept waiting when he is summoned.

Three steps, and they are reusable as a method.

1. Locate the duty in Article 21. The right to life is not merely a restraint on the State; it casts on the State a positive obligation to preserve life.
2. Extend it beyond the State, as a professional obligation. Because a doctor professes the skill by which life is preserved, the obligation attaches to him as a professional — which is how the case reaches the private hospital that the State-action reasoning alone would not touch.
3. Rank the competing duties by irreversibility. A procedural formality postponed can always be completed later; a life lost cannot be restored. So where the two collide, the procedural law yields.

Katara opens the emergency-refusal question. A model sequence: Article 21 and the State's obligation → the professional obligation of every doctor, public or private → the statutory follow-through in MV Act s. 134(a) and BNSS s. 397 with BNS s. 200 → if the State has brought the clinical-establishment law into force, the duty to stabilise an emergency medical condition → professional misconduct before the council → and the civil, consumer or criminal consequences, which belong to Module III.

It disposes of two defences outright: that the hospital was not authorised for medico-legal cases, and that the police had not yet arrived.

What it does not decide: it does not fix the quantum of compensation for a refusal (take that from Paschim Banga); it does not build or fund a health system (that too is Paschim Banga); and it does not license a small centre to attempt what it cannot do — the committee's own position was that primary aid must be given and the patient then referred where the expertise or facilities are lacking.

A caution on the report. The headnote of this decision names the medical council statute as an Act of 1860; the Code of Ethics of the day was in fact framed under the medical council law of 1956, which has since been repealed and replaced by the National Medical Commission Act 2019. Do not reproduce the headnote's date, and do not cite the 1956 Act as current law.