Member

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Note: This post is related to the previous post requesting support for the NCHRH bill that is likely to be proposed in the Indian Parliament this year. Again, I would greatly appreciate any publicity that you can give for this issue. Please link, reblog, tweet, digg, stumble, or share in all the other myriad ways of Web 2.0.

I would be grateful if  Indian bloggers and blog aggregators like DesiPundit and Blogbharti publicized this.

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Fellow medical blogger and colleague in my town Dr. George Paul is a highly respected teacher and practitioner who is well known in the dental & maxillofacial surgical fraternities. He and a group of like minded individuals have been actively involved in increasing awareness about irregularities in the functioning of private dental colleges and the poor role played by the Dental Council of India. I had forwarded him a link to my post asking for support for the NCHRH Bill.  George in turn forwarded it to his extensive mailing list. He also called me up and told me about an editorial by the Editor Emeritus of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics Dr. Sunil K Pandya, published in the current issue of that journal, which highlighted all that is wrong with the Medical Council of India. Here are the most relevant (and telling) excerpts from the long and detailed editorial.

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via Indian Journal of Medical Ethics - Medical Council of India : the rot within [links mentioned were added by me]

Consider two recent news items. The first in The Times of India on June 6, 2009 carried the headline “MCI members on erring college board“. In the text of the report, which investigated medical colleges in Chennai that charged capitation fees from students in violation of the law, the reporter noted: “Even as questions swirl over the impunity with which private medical colleges are charging illegal donations despite an explicit Supreme Court ban, it now appears members of the apex regulatory body - the Medical Council of India (MCI) - themselves have strong links with the offending institutions. “Two senior officials of MCI, the authority tasked with keeping a vigil on medical education, are currently board members of one of the colleges caught demanding capitation fees in the TOI-Times Now investigation. MCI president Ketan Desai and vice-president P C Kesavankutty Nayar are on the board of management of Sri Ramachandra University (SRU), which demanded Rs 40 lakh from students seeking MBBS admission.” Asked whether it was appropriate for him to be a member of the board of management of an institution that he was supposed to monitor in his capacity of president of the Medical Council of India, Dr Ketan Desai replied: “I am the UGC nominee and my colleague, Nayar, is the MCI nominee. It’s just like how the Dental Council of India members are on the board of several dental colleges. But I have never attended board meetings of SRU for at least three years now. We are there only as ex-officio members.” (18)

Were it not for Dr Ketan Desai’s formidable reputation, such a statement could have been attributed to naivety. The lie to his disclaimer was unwittingly provided by officials within the SRU. As the reporter pointed out, “Amazingly, the two medical colleges in Chennai are virtually unmindful of the peculiarity of the situation. An SRU official told this reporter, ‘The top MCI officials are on our board. We will talk to them about the allegations (of illegal donations) and sort them out.’ ” Dr Ketan Desai’s expertise in “sorting matters out” will stand him and the SRU in good stead and to mutual benefit. An independent report appeared on page 11 of the same issue of The Times of India as that on Dr Ketan Desai and Dr Nayar. Entitled “Trouble for UGC chief, CVC registers complaint against him on host of charges“, it informed the reader that the Central Vigilance Commission had registered a complaint against the UGC chairman, S K Thorat. The allegations against him ranged from his involvement in pushing through a Rs 224 crore e-governance project, corruption in the grant of deemed university status and misusing UGC resources to run his own institute, Indian Institute of Dalit Studies. (19)

Isn’t there an old English saying about birds of a feather?

In the minutes of the general body meeting held on March 1, 2009, we read an account of the presidential address delivered by Dr P C Kesavankutty Nayar, “president (acting)”. Dr Nayar stated that “The ‘intellectual informational inputs’ that were received through this Herculean exercise were diligently compiled… in the commemorative Souvenir that was released today under the caption ‘Tryst with Consensus’.” (17) In the context of Dr Nayar’s reference to Hercules, those at the helm of affairs might consider the fifth of the Twelve Labours set to Hercules. King Augeas was best known for his stables, which housed the single greatest number of cattle in the country and had never been cleaned. Hercules was asked to perform the task of cleaning these stables in a day - deemed almost impossible since the livestock were divinely healthy and therefore produced an enormous quantity of dung.

In the context of cleaning up the Medical Council of India, where shall we find an Indian Hercules today?

[read the entire editorial here]

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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The need now is not a Hercules to clean up the MCI, but for the government to demolish the entire shoddy edifice and replace it with something like the proposed National Council for Human Resources in Health, which ought to have independent constitutional powers comparable to other autonomous constitutional bodies like the Election Commission.

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Update 10.09.09, 10:30 AM:

Just found out about this article (via George again) that was published in the Kochi edition of The Indian Express - Docs launch online campaign by Sudha Nambudiri.

Even as the Union Health Ministry Task Force has suggested that all regulatory bodies, including the Medical Council of India, the Dental Council of India, the Pharmacy Council and the Nursing Council, be scrapped, an interesting petition has surfaced in cyberspace among the medical community in the country. The petition, addressed to the Prime Minister, seeks to garner support to revamp all fields of medical education and to bring it under a single regulatory body - the ‘National Council for Human Resources in Health (NCHRH)’. The online petition titled ‘Support group for National Council for Human Resources in Health Bill’ hosted on the web by PetitionOnline.com, http://www.PetitionOnline.com/NCHRH/ has more than 590 signatures till date and is fast gathering momentum. “I personally agree with what this petition says, and I think you might agree too”, is how the request goes. “All of us in the medical field in India know that the Medical and Dental Councils have become bloated bureaucracies that do very little for their members. I do not suppose the new council will turn out to be any different, but we can hope that there will be a change for the better,” was the comment by a doctor. It is learnt that the campaign has gained momentum following reports that the present members of the MCI, the DCI and other organisations are wooing MPs to delay or scrap the proposed Draft Bill to overhaul medical education. Meanwhile, in a hard-hitting editorial in the Journal of Medical Ethics, renowned neurosurgeons Dr Sunil Pandey … of Jaslok Hospital and Research Centre have asked how the heads of such boards could continue despite High Courts passing severe strictures against them.

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