In a battle over the reins of medical education in the country, the health ministry has finally prevailed over the human resource and development ministry. The latest draft of the National Commission for Higher Education and Research Bill has clearly excluded medical education along with agricultural education from the purview of the overarching apex body, which is proposed to regulate on matters related to higher education in the country.
This apex body was originally conceived to subsume multiplicity of regulators in higher education and serve as a single super regulator, which would strive to impart more freedom to higher educational establishments in managing their affairs.
That the health ministry is in no mood to relent on the matter also becomes clear from a letter that the union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad wrote three days back to the new governing board, which has taken over the functions of Medical Council of India after the statutory body was dissolved by an ordinance. Through this letter, the minister has called upon the members of the governing board to steer clear of ?touts who collect money from interested institutions in the name of the government, office bearers and the members of the Medical Council of India thereby bringing bad name to both the government and the Medical Council of India?.
Further, the minister writes: ?The above ordinance has given additional responsibility to the board of governors to grant permission for establishment of new medical colleges, opening the new or higher course of study and increase in admission capacity in any course of study referred to in Section 10 (A) in the Indian Medical Council Act, 1956.?
Azad has said the health ministry would provide the necessary support to the board even though he has asked his ministry officials to not interfere in the functioning of board of governors. Health ministry plans to set up a separate body ? National Council for Human Resource in Health (NCHRH) ? to exclusively look into health education and set standards and regulation for health sciences and research. The latest version of the NCHER draft bill, vetted by the task force, qualifies it as a proposed ?Act to provide for the determination, co-ordination, maintenance of standards in, and promotion of, higher education and research, including university education, technical and professional education other than agricultural (and medical) education, and for that purpose, to establish the National Commission for Higher Education and Research?.
Interestingly, even this version has still not deleted the inclusion of ?minister in charge of medical education in the government? as part of the five-member selection committee headed by the Prime Minister that would recommend the chairperson and other members of the commission. This is strange, given that medical education has now been segregated from the jurisdiction of NCHER in contrast to what was proposed earlier by the HRD ministry. Experts point out that this aberration could be corrected during subsequent revision.
The health ministry officials stuck to their guns in the face of intensifying efforts from the side of the HRD ministry to convince them on letting medical education be a part of the broader plan to avoid multiplicity of regulatory agencies in higher education. ?Medical science cannot be divorced from the actual health policy,? Sujatha Rao, secretary, health ministry had recently said after her meeting with HRD ministry officials.