Janjivan Bureau / New Delhi : Under pressure from the medical and political community, the government on Tuesday referred the revolutionary bill seeking to scrap the Medical Council of India to the parliamentary standing committee on health.
Minister of Parliamentary Affairs Ananth Kumar said that in view of the demands from the medical fraternity and several MPs the bill was being sent to the parliamentary panel with a request for an early examination and a report before the commencement of Budget session.
The government said it wanted to pass the bill by the next session.
The move to refer the bill to the panel comes on a day of the Indian Medical Association’s all-day strike in protest of the new law which proposes to replace the MCI with a new regulator called the National Medical Commissioner with four autonomous boards each looking after separate areas of UG, PG education, accreditation and ethics.
The NMC Bill also enables future possibilities of traditional medicine practitioners to prescribe modern medicines.
It provides for a licensiate exam at the level of MBBS pass-outs, a provision the IMA is dead against.
Most western nations have exit exams to test the quality of medical graduates.
India has long grappled with poor-quality medical education imparted by thriving private sector medical schools most of which are run by corporate or political people.
Many MPs, even of the ruling BJP, are opposing the bill which stresses outcome-based monitoring of medical colleges rather than simply looking at infrastructure and faculty as was the norm under the MCI which used to hold annual inspections to permit existing institutes to even add UG and PG seats.
Under the NMC Bill, a standard set of guidelines will be prescribed. Medical colleges will be required to show compliance on their websites and there will be no annual inspections. Managements can add seats as long as they comply. The rationale in the bill is—a good college will be automatically tested when its MBBS pass-outs sit for the exit test without clearing which they cannot practise medicine.
“Exit exam will be the bedrock of outcome-based monitoring of medical schools in India which has allowed over-regulation of the sector by doctors-dominated MCI to go on for far too long. This has bred serious corruption. The new bill hits at that root and seeks to create quality medical graduates besides encouraging opening up of medical sector, government sources said.
The government hopes the parliament committee will approve the bill soon because it was the committee which had given a clarion call to scrap the MCI calling it a corrupt body which had failed to live up to its mandate under the Indian Medical Council Act, 1956.
