thanks for the reply but.........
i am deciding the column name in where clause dynamically. so i am passing the value to the column name variable dynamically. u r reply program will ask a user input during execution, which i do not want! i want to decide the where clause column name dynamically.

Hello all,
when i jot, select &col from emp where &name = 'JOHN'; on the SQL> prompt, i am asked for the input for col and name and when i provide the following, the query works perfectly.
But when i write it in a procedure and substitute the &col and &name with some variables and run the procedure.. there is no results fetched. the &name when replaced with a variable, is considered as a value and not as a column...