The government yesterday announced plans to raise criteria for approving admissions into colleges of traditional systems of medicine amid widespread concerns that many colleges have made false claims about faculty and patients.
Senior officials in the department of Ayurveda, Unani, and Siddha (Ayush) said colleges of traditional medicine will now have to ensure they have 90 per cent of the desired faculty strength instead of the current requirement of 80 per cent.
Under the proposed changes, inspectors visiting colleges will scrutinise records from the associated hospitals’ X-ray departments, pantries and pharmacies to authenticate claims about the number of patients treated.
The colleges will also have to maintain a minimum number of senior faculty — professors or associate professors. An Ayurveda college with 50 seats, for instance, will have to have 32 faculty members, at least 10 senior faculty.
India has about 300 colleges that impart undergraduate education that lead to bachelor’s degrees in the traditional streams of medicine — Ayurveda, Unani, and Siddha. Officials estimate that about 15,000 undergraduate students enter these colleges each year after Class XII.
Department officials and the Central Council of Indian Medicine (CCIM), the apex regulator of traditional medicine, have observed that many colleges do not fulfil the required criteria and some colleges have even tried to make misleading claims about faculty and patients.
A survey initiated by the CCIM a few years ago had revealed that some 2,000 faculty members in colleges of traditional medicine had appointments in two institutions, said Raghunandan Sharma, CCIM president. “Nearly 400 faculty members had made false claims about experience,” Sharma said.
In one college in northern India, 26 faculty members had made false claims about experience, he said.
“There are some ground realities,” said Ayush secretary Anil Kumar. “Faculty are sometimes just not available. We can’t manufacture professors out of nowhere. It could take time for colleges to match 100 per cent requirements.”
A major bottleneck to reform in traditional medicine, said Sharma, is the absence of any notified minimum criteria. Ayush officials said a notification was under discussion and is likely to be out within the next six months.
A former CCIM official said the government had in recent years itself approved many colleges, which the council had not. Sharma confirmed that there was disagreement on criteria between the government and the CCIM.
Source:The Telegraph
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