HC wants MCI to take errant colleges to task
‘Penalise them for unaddressed issues’
Evolving a legal principle to ensure accountability of private medical colleges which do not rectify infrastructural or instructional deficiencies pointed out either by a Committee of Inspectors or Visitors of the Medical Council of India (MCI), the Madras High Court has suggested that compensatory costs should be imposed on those institutions at the rate of Rs. 2 lakh for every postgraduate student and Rs. 1 lakh for every undergraduate student passing out of them.
Stating that the MCI adopts a soft approach against such institutions and ends up punishing the students by refusing to register their degrees, the court said: “If the various measures adopted by the MCI are not producing desired results, perhaps time has come to evolve a legal principle and fasten accountability on the medical college concerned. The power to do so is clearly available both under Sections 17 and 19 of the [MCI] Act of 1956.”
A Division Bench of Justices Nooty Ramamohana Rao (since retired) and S.M. Subramaniam said that the State could recover the costs, imposed by the MCI, annually from the defaulting medical colleges through the Director of Medical Education and disburse the amount to the students concerned after deducting Rs. 10,000 with respect to every undergraduate student and Rs. 25,000 each from the postgraduate students.
“The money so withheld by the State shall not be appropriated by it for any other purpose but must be exclusively spent for upgrading the infrastructure in one or more than one medical college administered by it,” the judges said. The observations were made while dismissing a batch of writ appeals filed by the MCI against a single judge’s order to Tamil Nadu Medical Council to register the postgraduate degrees obtained by a group of doctors.
Victimising students
The council had refused to register their degrees on the ground that the colleges where they had studied had failed to rectify certain deficiencies. Holding this as not proper, the Division Bench said that the students could not be punished since they had pursued the courses in the colleges only after the MCI had accorded Letter of Permission (LoP) to the institutions.
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