New Delhi, April 14: Five former health secretaries and as many doctors have requested Prime Minister Narendra Modi to revamp the "corrupt and shameful" Medical Council of India (MCI), the country's apex agency tasked with regulating medical practice and maintaining standards in medical education.
In a letter to the Prime Minister, the former bureaucrats and the medics have said the MCI has "lost all credibility and moral standing," echoing concerns about corruption in the MCI that were expressed by a parliamentary committee last month.
"We request your personal involvement and leadership in the revamping of the MCI," they wrote. "We have helplessly witnessed several governments' inability in handling compromised individuals in the MCI even after being prosecuted and their integrity seriously questioned."
Their letter has described the MCI as a "highly corrupt and shameful" organisation that "brazenly allows private medical institutions to run as business ventures with ghost faculty and fake patients".
The MCI, a body of doctors elected by fellow doctors or nominated by the Centre and state governments, has for years been dogged by controversies over corruption during approvals to medical colleges, its inability to maintain quality standards in private medical colleges and its failure to curb unethical practices in medicine.
The letter is signed by former health secretaries Sujatha Rao, Keshav Desiraju, Javid Choudhury, Prasanna Hota and K. Chandramouli. The doctors who have signed are senior gastrointestinal surgeon Samiran Nundi, cardiologist and president of the Public Health Foundation of India K. Srinath Reddy, pediatrician and former biotechnology secretary Maharaj Bhan, cardiothoracic surgeon Gautam Sen and clinical immunologist Sita Naik.
The parliamentary standing committee on health and family welfare that had examined the functioning of the MCI had in a report tabled in Parliament last month said the MCI had "repeatedly failed on its mandates over the decades".
"The people of India will not be well-served by letting the modus-operandi of MCI continue unaltered to the detriment of medical education and decay of the health system," the committee had noted, and called for a radical restructuring of its organisation and make-up.
The former bureaucrats and doctors have requested Modi to implement the parliamentary committee's recommendations without delay. These include replacing the elected MCI with medical and non-medical persons, to be selected by expert body in a transparent manner in order to ensure that "hospital chains and owners of medical colleges, having deep conflicts of interest, do not enter this body and subvert it once again for their personal gains".
The committee has also sought a revampaing of undergraduate and postgraduate medical education, a separation of MCI's three functions - regulation, education, and accreditation or licensing of doctors - and the introduction of national entrance exam for aspiring doctors and exit exams for graduate doctors.
The letter to the Prime Minister has suggested that in view of the parliamentary committee's scathing observations, the current MCI be replaced by a "transition team of experts." This team would work out the reform agenda over the next two years and enable the implementation of a revised architecture of a new body whose creation will require a bill to be enacted by Parliament.
The CBI had arrested former MCI president Ketan Desai in April 2010 for allegedly seeking a bribe from a medical college. Earlier, in 2001, Delhi High Court had examined evidence suggesting that Desai had received payments for himself or his family and ordered his removal and directed the CBI to prosecute him.
Desai has consistently claimed the allegations against him were false. Several members of the MCI and the Indian Medical Association - the largest non-government association of doctors in India - have also in the past claimed that Desai has been framed without any evidence.
Many in the medical profession suspect that he still maintains significant influence over MCI affairs through the current members of the body.
The parliamentary committee had in its report said it was "shocked" to find that compromised individuals have made it to the MCI, while the health ministry is not empowered to remove or sanction a member of the council even if he has been proved corrupt.
