Nurse Did Everything Right. Haryana Made Her Fight Fuel-Austerity Order to Get to Australia.
Haryana Foreign Travel Ban: A nurse did everything by the book to travel to Australia for an exam; that was until Haryana’s fuel-austerity order blocked her. The High Court called it a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
North Desk Correspondent
Chandigarh, August 31
Sheetal Rani followed every rule in the book. The Punjab and Haryana High Court had to remind the Haryana government of that fact before it would let her go.
Rani is a Nursing Officer at PGIMS, Rohtak, where she joined in February 2021. Wanting to build her professional credentials, she applied to sit the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE), run by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency, to work toward recognition as a nurse in Australia. She did this the correct way, at every step, well ahead of any exam date.
Haryana Foreign Travel Ban: In January 2026, her department gave her a No Objection Certificate to apply for a visa. In February, she paid the prescribed exam fee. By May 29, she had an Australian Visitor (Subclass 600) visa in hand, valid five years. Her registration for the course was confirmed in early August, and her application to attend and sit the exam — scheduled for September 29 — was approved on August 4. On August 18, she formally applied for earned leave to travel.
That’s when the state government stopped her.
Haryana Foreign Travel Ban: Why Haryana stopped her
Haryana Foreign Travel Ban: Haryana’s Human Resource Department had, back on June 10, issued a sweeping set of instructions citing the Russia-Ukraine war and the crisis in West Asia as pressure on fuel and global supply chains.
Buried in a 25-point circular that also told departments to keep air conditioners at 24-26°C, banned new non-EV vehicle purchases, and asked religious leaders to encourage people to defer gold purchases, was a single line that would upend Rani’s plans: no government employee anywhere in Haryana — official reasons or personal — would be permitted to travel abroad until September 2026, except for medical treatment.
No exceptions for a visa already granted, a course already booked, an exam already scheduled months in advance. Her leave application was refused solely on the strength of that one clause.
Rani took the matter to the High Court, arguing that the right to travel abroad is a settled facet of personal liberty under Article 21, and that an executive circular with no legislative backing couldn’t lawfully strip an individual of that right, especially with no room made for individual circumstances.
‘Sledgehammer used to crack a nut’
Haryana Foreign Travel Ban: Justice Harpreet Singh Brar agreed, and didn’t mince words about how the ban had been drafted. The court found the instructions applied a “blanket prohibition” mechanically, with no scope to account for an employee’s duties, designation, or purpose of travel — and that the state had failed to show any real connection between banning a nurse’s personal travel and the fuel-conservation goals the circular claimed to serve.
The judgment went further, tying Rani’s case to the right to education itself, noting that blocking her from an exam meant to advance her qualifications reached beyond travel rights into a citizen’s right to learn. The state, the court found, had offered no explanation for how denying her this trip served fuel conservation at all. It added, “The factual matrix of the present case is illustrative of a sledgehammer being used to crack a nut, which is impermissible in our constitutional jurisprudence.”
“it is unclear as to how denial of foreign travel to a Nursing Officer seeking to upskill would assist in the larger aim of fuel conservation,” observed the court.
The order didn’t just strike down the clause; it set a hard deadline for Haryana’s competent authority to clear Rani’s leave application by the end of Monday. She’s set to rejoin duty once her sanctioned leave period ends.
For one nurse, it means catching a flight to sit an exam she spent the better part of a year preparing for. For the roughly lakh-plus government employees the circular applied to, it means a rule drafted in the name of an energy crisis quietly stops applying to their personal lives — struck down not because austerity was the wrong instinct, but because the state never bothered to explain why a Nursing Officer’s Australia trip stood in its way.
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