NMC to Use Aadhaar Enabled Biometric Attendance System for Assessing Medical Colleges

To ensure transparency and reduce manual interference in the assessment of medical colleges, data from Aadhaar Enabled Biometric Attendance System (AEBAS) portal will be used by the National Medical Commission, thus doing away with physical inspections. However, some surprise inspections by the commission will continue to verify the data which is being uploaded on the portal as well as to check the physical infrastructure, Dr B Srinivas, Secretary, NMC, said on Thursday.

To address the problem of ghost faculty in medical colleges and to also ensure attendance of medical students and faculty, the NMC is already basing its assessment based on AEBES portal which is already operational for the last one year. According to Dr Srinivas, “Using data from Aadhaar Enabled Biometric Attendance System dashboard will bring in more transparency. Seventy-five per cent attendance of the working days of two months on an average will be taken into consideration to reach a decision on whether a college is fulfilling the norms or not as far as attendance is concerned.” Earlier inspections used to be done even for a single day attendance, he said, adding that all the data will be available at any given time.

Further, the NMC will also launch a portal where medical colleges can appeal online for any redressal of their compliance related to assessments. Dr Srinivas said, “This new portal will be soon operational once the security clearance is taken from the concerned agencies to avoid hacking. Once it’s opened, every college will submit its data right from the beginning of the inception of the college.” Besides, the NMC in January issued “Minimum Standard of Requirements for Postgraduate Courses-2023 (PGMSR-2023)” guidelines barring the faculty from engaging in private practice during college hours, to deal with the issue of ghost faculty in medical colleges leading to burden on PG students.

It shall be mandatory to have at least 75 per cent attendance of the total working days for the required number of faculties, the guidelines stated. According to the guidelines, 80 per cent of the hospital beds should be occupied throughout the year by patients requiring inpatient care and minimum 15 per cent of the total beds in the department imparting post-graduate training should be Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds/High Dependency Unit (HDU) beds exclusively of that department.