Govt directs medical institutions to implement biometric attendance

Rising absenteeism among teachers and doctors in medical colleges is affecting health care and academic work, prompting the National Medical Commission (NMC) to direct all private and government medical institutions to strictly implement biometric attendance.

All teachers, protestors, tutors and senior residents will now have to register their attendance through Aadhaar Enabled Biometric Attendance System (AEBAS), which will be thoroughly reviewed by the medical education regulator on a daily basis.

This comes in the backdrop of several colleges in the states not being transparent in registering attendance, affecting patient care and academic calendar.

“NMC is now regularly monitoring the attendance database of medical colleges, with an aim to reform the medical education system. This system is meant to inculcate punctuality and discipline among the faculties, senior residents, teachers and protesters,” said an NMC official, requesting anonymity.

NMC Secretary Dr. Sandhya Bhullar has written a letter to all the medical colleges and directed them to implement Aadhaar based attendance system.

“It is mandatory for medical colleges to register faculty, residents and tutors under the new attendance system. Medical colleges should install adequate number of AEBAS devices as per requirement and each device should be connected to WiFi for seamless marking of attendance. Any discrepancy, malfunction and machine failure or shutdown should be addressed immediately so that the biometric data can be obtained. NMC will seriously consider whether biometric attendance data is not generated continuously for more than two days without any reason,” Bhullar said in the letter to medical colleges.

“All employees should register their attendance twice, i.e. when they come to the medical college and when they leave the college after work. Government medical colleges/standalone PG institutes and private medical colleges should follow their respective rules to take action against the employees for not adhering to the official timings in recording attendance,” the letter said.

A health ministry official said, “The aim is to check corruption in medical education and bring more transparency in the system. Recently, the Health Ministry has taken action against many small medical colleges for flouting the rules.

“Colleges have been instructed to install 16 cameras at prominent places for surveillance. This will allow us to have real-time monitoring on the operation of medical colleges such as faculty attendance, patients visiting OPDs, etc,” the official said.

There are more than 650 medical colleges teaching MBBS with about 96,600 faculties and 27,000 senior residents. Emailed queries to the health ministry did not elicit any response.