The bio-metric attendance systems placed in the Government Doon Medical College (GDMC) and its associated hospital has turned out be a mere showpiece as even after more than two months of their installation these machines are yet to be made operational.
These systems were installed on the directive of Medical Council of India (MCI), the apex body of medical education in India. However in absence of the connectivity with the servers of the MCI and National Informatics Centre (NIC), these machines have not become operational yet. The GDMC and its associated hospital have two types of the staff members, the faculty members of the college and the employees of the state government. The details of the faculty members would be linked with the server of MCI while the NIC link is needed for registering attendance of the State Government employees of the associated hospital.
The Principal of the GDMC, Dr Pradeep Bharati Gupta said that the biometric attendance system has to be linked with MCI and NIC. He said that the process of data collection from members of the staff is being done at present. Dr Gupta added that a special website of the hospital at national portal (gov.in) would then be created. He claimed the process of getting needed links with the MCI and NIC is under progress after which the attendance system would be made operational. The bio-metric machines are being installed under the Digital mission programme -II of the MCI.
The installation of these machines in the associated hospital of the medical colleges would ensure timely arrival and departure of the doctors. It is a normally observed phenomenon that the many doctors are late in arriving for their OPD and other duties due to which patients suffer.
It is also believed that the step of introducing a centralised Aadhar linked bio metric attendance system would provide a deadly blow to the system of Ghost faculty prevalent in the medical education of the country and could be immensely beneficial for the students.
A ghost faculty is a fictitious faculty which a college claims to be its member but in actual practice such faculties exist only on paper and these ghosts make a brief appearance when there is a MCI team visiting the college. The system of Ghost faculty is beneficial proposition for both the college and the doctors as the former don’t have to appoint high paying permanent members of faculty and the later getting some monitory benefit in lieu of putting their name on the attendance register of a college.