The Union Ministry of Health is creating an expert group to provide technical assistance to the Board of Governors that supersede the Medical Council of India. The group will include expert faculty from government colleges. The team will assist the Board of Governors (BoG) in assessing colleges for registration or renewal of licences.
The separate and independent team for assessment of colleges aim at ensuring complete transparency following controversies in a nexus between the MCI and private medical colleges over the issue of licences. Following the corruption charges, the government had dissolved the MCI last month.
The expert faculty group will also help the BoG with their daily functioning. As a first step, the health ministry officials are calling the deans of the government medical colleges across the country to shortlist the senior faculty members who are well-versed with the functioning of the medical regulator.
“To maintain complete transparency, there will be a corpus of experienced faculty that will help not only in assessing the applications from colleges but also with day-to-day technical operations to replace the now-defunct undergraduate and postgraduate committees,” said a senior health ministry official. “The ministry will provide technical assistance to the BoG,  to begin with, as we have the required expertise. The cadre that we are trying to create will be senior faculty with a good track record in terms of honesty and integrity,” he added.
The ministry plans to apply a roster system in place to ensure transparency.
“The roster will be a secret until the last minute so that no one is aware who will sit for which college’s assessment. This way, medical colleges will not be able to directly approach committee members, and chances of corrupt practices will go down sharply,” said the official.
Dr VK Paul, member, Niti Aayog, who heads the BoG said, “We are open to receiving suggestions from experts, and these committees can be chaired by members of the board. It is not a bad idea as there have been advisory committees earlier also. We will soon plan the structure and number of committees.”
The committee members will make recommendations to BoG on anything related to medical education in that country. The BoG is the ultimate deciding authority on anything related to the medical education in the country.

Source: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/health-ministry-to-create-a-corpus-of-senior-faculty-to-assist-mci-board-of-governors/story-iadziNNwiiTqo4p34KZo9M.html
Image: New Indian Express

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