The Medical Council of India has, on its website, put up the names of 129 doctors as being currently blacklisted but without any details of why their licences were suspended. A publicly available list giving names and details of doctors against whom action has been taken is a long pending demand of public health activists.
The 'List of Presently Blacklisted Doctors' is given below the Indian Medical Register list on the MCI website. However, the list seems arbitrary as the website gives no explanation of how the list was arrived at or how or why names might be taken off the list.
The president of the council, Dr Jayshree Mehta, did not respond to queries regarding how the list was compiled or why the list appears to be skewed with doctors from a few states dominating the blacklist. Doctors registered with the medical councils of Maharashtra (43) and Rajasthan (16) comprise 45% of the cases on the black list.
A doctor from Madhya Pradesh was shown to have been suspended for four years from October 2011 till October 2015, but his name has suddenly been removed. No explanation is given for why his name has been removed before the suspension ends.
"You cannot check the reason or the suspension procedure as the minutes of the ethics committee meetings, in which disciplinary action against doctors is decided, has not been put up. Just as MCI maintains the Indian Medical Register with data of doctors registered in all the state medical councils, they ought to maintain a consolidated blacklist of doctors against whom action has been taken by various state medical councils. In the current form, the list is of little use to the public," said Dr M C Gupta, a doctor who is also a lawyer. In the US, for instance, it is easy to find out which doctor has been punished and how many times, pointed out Dr Gupta, adding that a similar list ought to be available to the public here too.
Almost 40% of the cases, 51 out of 129, are marked as "not disposed off" though the date of suspension of the licence is mentioned. More than half of these cases are from 2012, when the current council was not in place. In 2012, MCI was being run by a board of governors nominated by the government. The council was reconstituted in October 2013.
Dr Om Prakash Tiwari from Uttar Pradesh, registered in 1978, has been suspended the longest, for seven years from September 2013 till September 2020. Thirty two doctors have been suspended for five years. Since the reconstituted MCI took over, four doctors have been suspended for five years, and 14 for just one year. In 2015, many doctors were suspended for one month to six months. The system of deciding the quantum of penalty or period of suspension seems arbitrary with no publicly available rules or criteria about how this is decided.
The MCI president also did not respond to questions about whether the MCI had any way of checking if the suspended doctors were continuing their practice or not.
The 'List of Presently Blacklisted Doctors' is given below the Indian Medical Register list on the MCI website. However, the list seems arbitrary as the website gives no explanation of how the list was arrived at or how or why names might be taken off the list.
The president of the council, Dr Jayshree Mehta, did not respond to queries regarding how the list was compiled or why the list appears to be skewed with doctors from a few states dominating the blacklist. Doctors registered with the medical councils of Maharashtra (43) and Rajasthan (16) comprise 45% of the cases on the black list.
A doctor from Madhya Pradesh was shown to have been suspended for four years from October 2011 till October 2015, but his name has suddenly been removed. No explanation is given for why his name has been removed before the suspension ends.
"You cannot check the reason or the suspension procedure as the minutes of the ethics committee meetings, in which disciplinary action against doctors is decided, has not been put up. Just as MCI maintains the Indian Medical Register with data of doctors registered in all the state medical councils, they ought to maintain a consolidated blacklist of doctors against whom action has been taken by various state medical councils. In the current form, the list is of little use to the public," said Dr M C Gupta, a doctor who is also a lawyer. In the US, for instance, it is easy to find out which doctor has been punished and how many times, pointed out Dr Gupta, adding that a similar list ought to be available to the public here too.
Almost 40% of the cases, 51 out of 129, are marked as "not disposed off" though the date of suspension of the licence is mentioned. More than half of these cases are from 2012, when the current council was not in place. In 2012, MCI was being run by a board of governors nominated by the government. The council was reconstituted in October 2013.
Dr Om Prakash Tiwari from Uttar Pradesh, registered in 1978, has been suspended the longest, for seven years from September 2013 till September 2020. Thirty two doctors have been suspended for five years. Since the reconstituted MCI took over, four doctors have been suspended for five years, and 14 for just one year. In 2015, many doctors were suspended for one month to six months. The system of deciding the quantum of penalty or period of suspension seems arbitrary with no publicly available rules or criteria about how this is decided.
The MCI president also did not respond to questions about whether the MCI had any way of checking if the suspended doctors were continuing their practice or not.
