On the Kerala High Court’s Judgment: Must a doctor erase her medical past to become a lawyer?

SOME OF INDIA’S most consequential health reforms have been led not by doctors, but by lawyers. When Novartis sought a patent over Glivec, the life-saving drug used to treat chronic myeloid leukaemia, it was lawyer Anand Grover, representing the Cancer Patients Aid Association, a Mumbai-based cancer advocacy NGO, who successfully challenged the patent before the Supreme Court. The judgment preserved India’s ability to manufacture affordable generic medicines, ensuring treatment remained available at a fraction of the patented price for millions of cancer patients in India and across the developing world.

Equally, many significant legal reforms have been driven by doctors. Following the death of his wife due to medical negligence, Dr. Kunal Saha spent nearly fifteen years litigating against the hospital and doctors responsible. His case culminated in the Supreme Court awarding the highest compensation in a medical negligence claim and fundamentally reshaped standards of accountability in Indian healthcare. Through People for Better Treatment, a Kolkata-based NGO working on medical accountability that he founded in 2001, he has since assisted hundreds of victims of medical malpractice.

These stories demonstrate that medicine and law are not competing disciplines but complementary ones. Yet a recent judgment of the Kerala High Court in T. M. Manju v. Bar Council of Kerala, delivered last month, moves in the opposite direction. It held that a registered homeopathic doctor must cancel her medical registration before enrolling as an advocate. At a time when healthcare is increasingly regulated by law and legal disputes increasingly depend upon scientific evidence, the question is whether India should be making it harder, or easier, for professionals to bridge the two fields.

Registration equal to practice?

In the case at hand, the appellant had already stopped practising medicine. She had surrendered her municipal licence to run her clinic and furnished a written undertaking to the Bar Council that she would not practise medicine after enrolling as an advocate. Her application was nevertheless rejected because she continued to retain her medical registration. The Kerala High Court concluded that the continued existence of medical registration meant she could not truthfully declare that she had ceased medical practice.

The Court observed that a professional cannot “share his allegiance with another profession,” warning that such divided loyalty could result in serving “two masters at the same time” and ultimately in “splitting the professional soul” between two professions. There is force in the proposition that law and medicine demand undivided commitment and that simultaneous practice may create ethical conflicts. But the difficulty lies in treating registration itself as proof of divided loyalty.

Retaining registration does not invariably mean that a doctor is also treating patients, earning professional income or holding herself out as being in active clinical practice. Registration is a legal recognition of qualification and competence. Doctors routinely keep their registration while working exclusively in research, academia, public health, hospital administration, pharmaceutical regulation, health policy or international organisations. Registration also enables them to teach in medical colleges, serve on statutory committees, undertake expert medico-legal work and participate in ethics committees. More than a licence to practise, registration is a formal recognition of specialised knowledge and professional competence.

This recognition is earned through enormous personal and public investment. Becoming a doctor requires five-and-a-half years of undergraduate medical education, a compulsory rotating internship and, another three years of postgraduate specialisation. Last year, while addressing the 21st convocation ceremony of King George’s Medical University in Lucknow, Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda claimed that the Government spends an estimated ₹30–35 lakh per student on an annual basis. Obtaining the same qualification in a private medical college can cost over ₹4.5 crore. The public also invests heavily in the admission process itself. The 381st Report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports (2026) records that the National Testing Agency spent ₹3,064.77 crore conducting the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (‘NEET’) over the previous six years.

Against this backdrop, why should the State compel a professional to surrender statutory recognition of expertise that society has invested so heavily in creating merely because she wishes to pursue another profession?