As the Government moves to overhaul the Medical Council of India (MCI), the top dental regulatory body seems to have woken up to tighten the noose around the erring dental colleges to ensure quality standard of education in the dental sector.
To begin with, the Dental Council of India has recently issued warning to the dental colleges to mandatorily send their biometric attendance report in respect of their teaching faculty or face action.
As per the DCI regulations, the report is one of the mandatory requirements to keep track on the absenteeism, frequent migration, punctuality of the teaching faculty working in the colleges.
The move came after the DCI, a statutory and recommendatory body to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, woke up to the fact that many dental colleges, particularly in the private sector had not sent the report for the past two years.
“… I am directed to say that all the dental colleges in the country are under statutory obligation to send their biometric attendance report to the DCI either of their own machine or machine installed by the DCI to be revived or maintained by the college at their own cost…,” said Ml Meena, DCI Secretary in charge in a circular issued early this month.
“In case any dental institution fails to send the report of their teaching faculty, the Council may take necessary steps against such defaulting institutions, as it may deem fit and proper, including not to recommend the necessary permission/renewal/recognition in respect of such defaulting Institution,” said the circular.
It was in 2010, the DCI, taking a serious note of absenteeism among dental college professors, had introduced biometric attendance system for the teachers. The move aims to weed out institutes which were compromising on the mandatory conditions including number of staff and teaching hours.
The database from the biometric attendance also aims to help the authorities verify attendance apart from documentary proof so that action can be taken against erring doctors.
The recent move by the DCI seeking attendance report is being seen as a knee jerk reaction to the Government’s decision to restructure and reform the MCI which has been accused of rampant corruption and irregularities causing immense loss to the healthcare system.
A recent report by the Parliamentary Standing Committee (PSC) on Health and Family Planning too had noted that “there is total system failure due to which the medical education system is fast sliding downwards and quality has been hugely sidelined in the context of increasing commercialisation of medical education and practice,” it said.