NMC stalls on making med college assessments public

Nine months after the National Medical Commission (NMC) decided to seek legal opinion on whether the assessment forms of medical colleges can be made public, the matter remains unresolved as NMC claimed, in response to an RTI query , that the file is still "under process". As a result, MBBS aspirants are forced to choose medical colleges without access to details of the assessment of the infrastructure and faculty available in a college.

The chief information commissioner had ordered the NMC several times in 2024 to make assessment reports public, stating that "disclosing these assessment reports is essential for the aspiring medical students seeking admission".

Neither reports of inspection of medical colleges nor standard assessment forms (SAF) are being made public by the NMC. The SAF is mandatory and is meant as an annual self-declaration by a medical college giving information about infrastructure, faculty, patient load, academic activities and so on. In the NMC meeting held on Sept 23, 2024, "the commission opined that the SAF form need not be in public domain" and instructed its Medical Assessment and Rating Board to take further action. However, according to the minutes of the meeting obtained through RTI, V Hekali Zhimomi, an additional secretary in the health ministry, suggested that an opinion should be obtained from the department of legal affairs.

When RTI activist Dr KV Babu asked about the status of the SAF disclosure issue, the NMC responded that "file for seeking legal opinion on the matter of SAF disclosure is under process and hence the information in this regard is not available".

NMC had brought in the Aadhaar-Enabled Biometric Attendance System in Aug 2018, but found that people were using silicon thumb imprints to manipulate the system. To counter this, the NMC mandated face-based Aadhaar authentication for faculty attendance in medical colleges from April this year.

However, the NMC seems reluctant to adopt the simplest system of making colleges' self-declarations public so that students and public could verify if the faculty, infrastructure and patient load being claimed in the declaration were indeed available. The Medical Council of India, which the NMC replaced, used to make the assessment reports of all medical colleges public. It also used to put up the minutes of all meetings in the public domain. The NMC doesn't do either.