New Delhi, March 30: Uncertainty hangs over the future of more than 4,000 aspiring post-graduate medical students with no decision yet on whether there will be a re-examination for entrance to MD courses.

An officer in the directorate general of health services in New Delhi told The Telegraph today that a decision on whether to conduct a re-examination would depend on a ruling by the Supreme Court expected tomorrow.

A group of 12 doctors has jointly filed a petition in the Supreme Court opposing any re-examination on the grounds that there had been no leak of question papers and the alleged culprits had been caught cheating through mobile phones.

“This has come as a bolt from the blue,” said Manpreet Singh Anand, a petitioner. “This is the toughest exam in India and many of us who qualified did not appear for the state exams. Some of us quit jobs and even quit MD positions for better courses.”

The petitioners’ ranks in the exam, conducted by AIIMS, range between 58 and 2000. “We’ve studied very hard for more than a year, sitting at home trying to secure ranks,” said Somnath Datta, a doctor in Calcutta. “We can’t repeat this performance again and again,” he said.

“There are more than 4,000 of us. The CBI has caught only 28. Why should the rest of us get punished for what someone else did?”

The doctors are worried because the directorate general of health services had indicated that it would consider a re-examination were evidence of malpractice to emerge through the CBI investigations. “Only medical students know how hard we had to study,” said Anand. “We immerse ourselves in books and cut ourselves out of the world.”

Anand said some doctors had even paid bond money of several thousand rupees to move out from MD courses in top institutions after they obtained ranks that would secure them better courses in other institutions.

Several senior doctors said they were not surprised with the reports of the alleged cheating by aspiring postgraduate medical students. “There are many doctors who’ve got into the undergraduate MBBS programmes by paying for their seats. They’re trying to get into MD courses now,” said Kunchala Shyamprasad, the vice-president of the National Board of Examinations.

“It’s possible students who paid enormous amounts of money for MBBS in private medical colleges want to recover it. The MD programme is viewed as a route to big money,” said Rajesh Kumar, professor of community medicine at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh.

“There might be doctors who want to make it through unfair means. It’s part of a general decline in morality.”