NEW DELHI : The National Medical Commission on Thursday said that the mandatory Aadhaar-enabled biometric attendance system (AEBAS) for faculty and doctors is not to harass them but to weed out ghost faculty.
“This system is not to harass the doctors or students. It is to make sure that genuine doctors and faculty members are working in the medical college. There should not be any ghost faculty,” said Dr. (Prof.) B. Srinivas, Secretary, NMC.
Allying the fears of doctors that they will have to mark their attendance at all times, Srinivas said that the faculty must do it once a day.
He said that the biometric attendance system would help the faculty and doctors by taking them away from the inspector Raj system and into a digitally-driven system.
“We wanted transparency in the system. The idea is to confirm whether they are present in the medical college. With this system, there will be no issue of manipulating the data,” he said about the AEBAS portal, which will be available on the NMC site.
From March 8, colleges will have to upload their data on the portal themselves, said Dr. Aruna Vanikar, President of the Undergraduate Medical Education Board (UGMEB), NMC. Once colleges authenticate these data, they will be visible to the public, she added.
However, the unique ID will only be given to colleges registered under AEBAS.
Several medical associations took up the issue of mandatory biometric attendance for doctors and faculty. Dr. Rohan Krishnan, national chairman of the Federation of All India Medical Association (FAIMA) said, “It is a good measure by the NMC to introduce attendance only once because many times doctors are busy in some work in the hospital, which requires his/her immediate attention as their priority is to save the lives of the patient.”
The AEBAS was made mandatory by the NMC in its Minimum Requirements for Annual MBBS Admissions Regulations, 2020. According to Dr. Vanikar, the new portal will be linked with the ‘command and control centre’ of NMC per the regulations. Colleges have also been mandated to install cameras and to be linked with the IT system of NMC.
She added that one of the major reason of mandating AEBAS was to revive the dignity of the medical profession.
She said medical colleges were reluctant to follow the regulation. “They came up with several excuses such as the system is full of flaws or that older aged faculty were not able to register their attendance,” she said. However, she said, these issues were resolved by continuous interactions.