8 years on, 3 profs at Patna AIIMS face axe for lack of qualifications
The governing body of Patna’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Thursday evening ratified a proposal to terminate the services of three senior faculty members for lacking basic qualifications on the date of their appointment.
Among those facing termination are Ajit Saxena, professor and head in the department of pathology and laboratory medicine, Sushmita Das, associate professor in the department of microbiology, and Alok Ranjan, assistant professor in the department of community and family medicine.
The AIIMS administration was tight-lipped.
“Let the minutes (of the meeting) be prepared; we can then let you know about it,” said Dr Narendra Kumar Arora, chairman of the governing body of AIIMS-Patna, and also the executive director of International Clinical Epidemiological Network.
AIIMS-Patna director Dr Prabhat Kumar Singh also refused to divulge details. “Once the minutes of the meeting are prepared and approved, it will be in public domain. Until then, I cannot divulge any information about the governing body meeting,” said Dr Singh.
Saxena and Das possess postgraduate (PG) degrees in zoology, a non-medical subject, whereas the December 2011 faculty recruitment advertisement for AIIMS required PG degree recognised by the Medical Council of India or equivalent in the subject concerned.
Ranjan had the qualification, but did not have a Ph.D degree at the time of joining the AIIMS.
All these appointments date back to 2012-13.
If sources were to be believed, two faculty members still do not possess the basic qualifications required to occupy the position they do. The other faculty member, however, fulfilled the requisite criteria nine months after his joining the AIIMS on September 7, 2012, after he submitted his PhD degree from a university in the US.
A faculty member, now facing termination, was even promoted during the August-September 2017 assessment promotion scheme of the AIIMS, despite not possessing the basic qualification.
The doctors concerned did not respond to phone calls or text messages on Friday.
Some doctors had earlier said that they should not be penalised after eight years for the selection committee’s fault. A few of them had moved the court against the disciplinary action initiated by the institute.
The skewed appointments were initially red-flagged in 2013 by Anil Kishore Yadav, an IPS officer who was the then deputy director (administration) of AIIMS-Patna.
The Vikas Arya committee, constituted by the ministry of health and family welfare (MoH&FW) in 2014, also found the appointments faulty. Finally, a five-member highpowered committee, comprising the director of AIIMS-Bhubaneswar and AIIMS-Patna, also held the appointments erroneous.