NMC trains its guns on UG medical colleges, in a first seeks videos of internal examinations

New Delhi: The country’s apex medical education regulator in its cleanup exercise has now trained its guns on all medical colleges and institutions offering undergraduate (UG) courses.

After seeking a self-declaration from medical colleges offering postgraduate (PG courses), the National Medical Commission (NMC) has now sought an annual declaration from all UG medical schools for their annual renewal by 15 November.

As part of this plan, the NMC in a first has sought videography of internal examinations, along with year-wise letters of recognition granted to them by the regulator.

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With the NMC’s four boards working at cross-purposes, as reported by Mint earlier, the regulator has warned colleges that there should not be any mismatch between the details shared with the four boards. Failure to comply with the directions could result in seat cancellations.

The present directives have been issued by the Undergraduate Medical Education Board (UGMEB). The other three boards are the Postgraduate Medical Education Board (PGMEB), the Ethics and Medical Registration Board (EMRB) and the Medical Assessment Rating Board (MARB).

The submission of the annual declaration to the NMC aims to ensure that medical colleges are following the rules set by the regulator in terms of providing highest standard of medical education and have deputed well-qualified teaching faculties and student-friendly environments, maintaining proper infrastructure, laboratories, research activities, syllabus, installed Aadhaar-enabled biometric attendance systems, etc.

“No seat shall be permitted in case the College/Institution fails to submit the Annual Declaration within the specified time period,” said Dr B Srinivas, secretary, NMC, in a communication to all medical institutions seen by Mint.

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The regulator has specifically asked colleges to upload the letter of recognition/continuation of recognition grant to the medical colleges by the NMC or its predecessor, the Medical Council of India, for grant of permission to establish the institute.

Medical colleges are also required to upload the last renewal letter issued for the 2024-25 and, most importantly, need to upload the details of the videography of the examination by them, said the communciation.

“Submission of annual declaration by colleges is a very useful tool to access the medical colleges because on it basis their registartion gets renewed. This activity puts in place the true details of number of genuine faculties posted in the colleges and weeds out ghost faculties, does the colleges have adequate infrastructure to run the college, number of students, number of patients they are seeing in OPD and IPD (outpatient and in-patient departments), transparency during the examination,” said Dr Neeraj Bedi, former medical supritendent at Mahavir Medical College in Bhopal.

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The NMC was created by a government notification on 24 September 2020 after scrapping the Medical Council of India, with an aim of introducing objectivity, transparency and fairness in the processes, and to provide more operational flexibility and ensure prompt decision-making to improve the quality of medical education.

Queries sent to the health ministry spokesperson remained unanswered.