After medical and dental colleges, it is the turn of the 750 Ayush (Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathic) colleges in the country to join the digitisation initiative of the Central Government wherein attendance of their faculty will be tracked on real time daily basis.
The Union AYUSH Ministry has recently asked all the colleges and the hospitals attached with them, both in the private and public sectors, to install Aadhaar-based GPS Biometric attendance system, in a move aimed to check the faculty attendance, keep out ghost teachers and make the process transparent.
“The attendance of faculty in all the Ayush colleges shall be through Geo location-based system which will be made accessible by the respective Councils as well as the Ministry. They will be centrally connected through IT solution by January 15,” Secretary (AYUSH) Vaidya Rajesh Kotecha said on Thursday.
The move follows complaints against the doctors and professors that they skip the hospitals and classes in the colleges. In many Ayush colleges, some teachers exist only on paper. But these teachers are paraded during inspections.
Taking about the digital initiative, Kotecha said it is IT-based innovative solution which can be installed on the android phones. In due course, the colleges will be asked to ensure internet connectivity so that the attendance can be uploaded to a server controlled and managed by the Ministry at the central level.
“The most remarkable feature of this system is that besides monitoring of attendance of faculty through a biometric system, it is location-based. This means that it will be operational within four meters only. No one can fudge the attendance,” he added.
With this, the AYUSH Ministry has joined the Medical Council of India (MCI) and Dental Council of India (DCI) which have already initiated such a system to weed out ghost faculty as well as ensure transparency.
In yet another step aimed to ensure quality education, the Ayush Ministry, for the first time, has decided to conduct Ayush National Teachers Eligibility Tests for appointments of all teachers in the AYUSH institutions. “A unique code for such teachers shall be allotted by their councils like Central Council of Indian Medicines(CCIM) before their appointment,” said the official.
To attract meritorious students to train in the traditional methods of - Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy - the ministry has also decided that admissions to various AYUSH courses will be conducted through the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET), a common entrance test from the next academic session in 2018-19.