An ailing health ministry

Failure to fix medical regulator's problems

The Union health ministry, which has been run for five years by Ghulam Nabi Azad, has consistently been in trouble of late. The Supreme Court ordered an overhaul of the regulation of clinical trials; and the United States Food and Drug Administration has questioned the manufacturing practices of Indian pharmaceutical companies. Both trials and pharmaceutical companies are the ministry's bailiwick. Now, developments related to the Medical Council of India (MCI), the national regulator for medical education and practice, have hit the headlines. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has alleged that political patronage from the Congress, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and the Samajwadi Party has together tried to return its former head, Ketan Desai, to the MCI - and that the government even transferred a health secretary who objected. Mr Desai lost the position in 2010, along with his medical licence, after he was arrested for taking a bribe to favour a particular medical college.

Mr Desai's case is that the 2001 investigation against him relating to income tax has been closed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (the 2010 bribery case is still on), that he has been unanimously elected to the syndicate of Gujarat University and that the Gujarat Medical Council has nominated him to the MCI. The latter has no powers to cancel a doctor's licence, he argues, which is issued by the relevant state medical council. The problem is that the government has failed to carry out its earlier promise to place the MCI under an overarching body when it was disbanded after Mr Desai's arrest. And it appears to have shot itself in the foot by a recent action. It has changed the code of ethics so that it applies only to doctors and not to their associations, thus rendering null and void its earlier action against the Indian Medical Association, which represents medical practitioners, for breaking the code by endorsing the products of corporate entities.

In its statement, the AAP was no doubt taking a cue from several open letters that had been written to the prime minister in the wake of these events - the letters argued that the MCI was failing as a regulator. Liquor barons, real estate developers and people with political connections, who have no interest in medical education, run a majority of profitable private medical colleges - even as standards fall further. This is extremely worrying for the future of public health and reflects poorly on Mr Azad's stewardship of a crucial ministry.