MCI planning to track every movement of Medical College Doctors by RFID
The MCI zeroes in on Advanced technology to crackdown on ‘Ghost walking’ faculty doctors. Radio Frequency Identification(RFID) system, an apparently error-free system has been resorted to keep the faculty at their colleges until the closing time. In this system, a database consisting of all the faculty doctors is created. The MCI intends to achieve this by making use of the Aadhar cards, fingerprnts and photographs of the doctors. Dr Ramesh Reddy, a member of the MCI says “Sensors at all medical colleges would be installed to track the movements of the respective faculty members. A high end computer system at the college receives the data and relays it to a central server at the MCI headquarters.Application of the RFID system is mandatory for all private and government medical colleges.”
This move comes in the wake of about 400 teachers in private medical colleges in Punjab who only ‘existed in the payrolls but not present in the colleges’. President of Punjab Medical Council Dr GS Grewal says “ One of our council members, a cardiologist, is also working as Assistant Professor at a Private medical college in Solan. I have requested the MCI to serve him and other ghost teachers a notice.”
The RFID is likely to hit short staffed medical colleges the hardest. These colleges bring in ‘Ghost faculties’ on the day of MCI inspection to show the ‘numbers’ to retain the existing seats or to increase the numbers.Fulfilment of the norm of ‘ one professor for one student’ set by the MCI for PG seats is extremely difficult if this system is successfully implemented.
In a notification on the RIFD system released on March 17 2015, the Deputy Secretary of the MCI Ashok K Harit acknowledges that earlier attempts to implement the monitoring system was a failure. A successful application of this approach would mean good news for the students who would have the physical presence of a teacher to actually teach them clinical skills. This initiative by the MCI is one which all medical education fraternity would be interested to keep a track of.
But the question remains : – Is this invasion of privacy ?
