Lawyer Prashant Bhushan wrote to the SC-appointed panel Justice RM Lodha Committee to oversee the functioning of MCI.
Activist lawyer Prashant Bhushan has written a letter to Supreme Court-appointed panel Justice R M Lodha Committee to oversee the functioning of Medical Council of India (MCI), suggesting remedial measures to bring total transparency in the apex medical body. He has contended that the apex regulator of medical education has failed to discharge its duties while granting licence to medical colleges and suggested video recording of the inspections physically carried out by its members before granting licence to the colleges.
In his 74-page letter, Bhushan said, "A lack of transparency in the functioning of the MCI, and arbitrary decision making process, especially in regard of permission to open new medical colleges and permission to increase admission capacity, which has led to wide scale corruption in the MCI…. This has adversely affected the standard of medical education and the quality of healthcare professionals that the medical education system is producing, directly and adversely affecting the quality of healthcare available to the citizens."
He also suggested that the MCI must create a proper live database by filtering old MBBS names which were registered way back in 1965 so that can be ascertain how many doctors are actually practicing in the country and how they are distributed across the public and private sectors and also across rural and urban areas.
A detailed guideline to deal with the complaint of Professional Misconduct was sought against delinquent doctors. Further, he suggested that the inspections should be video recorded, "each and every detail of the health professionals and the equipment duly recorded, and all of this put on the website so that the citizens can view it."
In addition over conflict of interests with members of the MCI sitting in boards of colleges whose inspections are to be done, Bhushan proposed for a specialised body to carry out inspections in a transparent and fair manner.
Endorsing a Parliamentary Standing Committee report of March 2016 that medical education and profession in the country is at its "lowest ebb" and suffering from "total system failure" due to corruption and decay, the Supreme Court in May had ordered constitution of a three-member committee, headed by former Chief Justice of India R M Lodha, to oversee the functioning of the MC for at least a year.
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