“The MCI should have half the members from the public and half of them should be nominated doctors and not elected.
“The MCI should have half the members from the public and half of them should be nominated doctors and not elected. The MCI needs to be restructured,” Dr Samiran Nundy, dean, Ganga Ram Institute for Post-Graduate Medical Education and Research, told this newspaper. A letter drafted by former health secretary Sujatha Rao on the urgent need to reform and restructure the MCI has already been sent to PM Narendra Modi.
Adopting a resolution that demands the scrapping of the Indian Medical Council Act, the doctors said its provisions were lenient and that it should be replaced with a new law to check corruption in medical education and promote ethics in the profession. The alliance was announced by Dr Abhay Shukla of Jan Swasthya Abhiyan (People’s Health Movement) with representatives of a number of doctors’ bodies, including Indian Doctors for Ethical Practice and SATHI.
Dr Jasodhara Dasgupta of Medico Friend Circle, another partner in the alliance, said the time was ripe for the government to take strong action against MCI which, she said, has failed to equip doctors to handle even primary health care issues.
Dr Nundy suggested that Britain’s General Medical Council could be a good model to follow while restructuring MCI. “The MCI is so corrupt that everything they do it is for money. There is huge capitation fees, people bribe the examiners, the doctors charge hugely and ask for unnecessary investigations. 67 per cent of the medical fraternity have not published a single research paper from 2005-2014,” he said.
We therefore felt it necessary to form a group of like-minded people to pressure the government and parliamentarians to revamp the MCI,” he added.
A former health secretary said on condition of anonymity, “Even as the SC direction was a great shot in the arm, the coalition will further build pressure on the government to comply with the parliamentary standing committee report.”
