Patients and their relatives at AIIMS on Thursday. (AP)

New Delhi, Aug. 30: Doctors at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences have ended their strike, but the turf war between the Centre and the institute intensified this evening, threatening to push AIIMS into further chaos.

A day after Union health minister Anbumani Ramadoss returned a contentious batch of students’ degrees to AIIMS to “rectify errors”, a defiant institute administration started releasing the degrees without the minister’s mandatory signature.

Resident doctors on strike for three days resumed work earlier in the afternoon after Delhi High Court ordered the government to take all necessary steps to end the strike.

Opinion is divided over the validity of the 49 degrees that AIIMS issued to MBBS students today, but the move made the health ministry ponder over fresh legal action against an old enemy — institute director P. Venugopal.

AIIMS, embroiled in the anti-quota agitation last year and a continuing feud between the ministry and its director, has not held convocation for its students since February 2005. In all, some 700 students are waiting for their degrees.

Twenty of the 49 students, whose degrees are at the centre of the current crisis, wish to leave India for foreign universities — and need the degrees urgently to apply.

The degrees — which are conventionally signed by the AIIMS president (the health minister), director, dean and registrar — reached Ramadoss on August 20.

Under pressure from doctors who went on strike demanding that he sign the degrees immediately, Ramadoss on August 28 wrote to Venugopal citing “errors”, which needed to be “rectified”.

Dr Sandeep Agarwal, appointed to the post of registrar by Venugopal, signed the degrees without seeking the mandatory consent of the AIIMS governing body.

Venugopal today wrote back to Ramadoss, claiming there was “nothing wrong” or “erroneous” in the degrees.

Today, a staff council meeting, headed by Venugopal, decided that the degrees would be issued without the signature of either Ramadoss or the registrar.

“The certificates we are now receiving from AIIMS have the signatures of the director and the dean (Dr R.K. Deka),” Kumar Harsh, president of the Resident Doctors Association, said.

The Telegraph has however learnt from sources that Deka had not signed “any fresh degrees today”.

“What appears to have happened is that the AIIMS director whitened out the health minister and the registrar from the same degrees, before handing them out to students,” a source said.