From MCI to NMC, the challenge of tackling corruption remains; CBI's FIR raises many serious questions

It is worth noting that in 2010, the then MCI President Ketan Desai was arrested by the CBI on several charges of corruption, including taking a bribe of Rs 2 crore. The board of NCI, which was accused of being neck deep in corruption, was dissolve,d and its work was given to the Board of Governors (BOG).

In view of the inherent corruption in the organizational structure of MCI, the Modi government decided to form NMC in 2019 in its second term, and also got its approval from the Parliament. But the allegations of involvement of eight officials of the Health Ministry as well as an NMC official in the CBI FIR make it clear that in the last five years, the mafia associated with medical education has been successful in breaking into the entire system.

The CBI FIRs of 2010 and 2025 confirm the same method of corruption. In which the most important is to give information about the date of inspection of the concerned colleges in advance. Due to this, medical colleges were successful in arranging hired professors and fake patients on the day of inspection. The CBI has claimed to have found concrete evidence of this in the raid. Along with this, evidence has also been found of the inspection team taking bribes and sending them through hawala.

The officials of NMC and Health Ministry, who were responsible for the quality of medical education, were themselves working to spoil it. Thankfully, till now the name of the top official of NMC and Health Ministry has not come out in the CBI investigation, as happened in 2010 with the arrest of MCI chief Ketan Desai.

Much more needs to be done to remove the termites of corruption in medical education; merely substituting MCI with NMC would not do.