Times of India: New Delhi: Thursday, December 24, 2015.
A recent RTI
response from the Medical Council of India (MCI) has revealed how Parliament
was misled in a case related to the Indian Medical Association (IMA) endorsing
commercial products, which is a violation of the code of ethics for doctors.
Then health
minister Ghulam Nabi Azad told Parliament in February 2014 that the MCI had
informed the health ministry that the complaint of Dr K V Babu regarding
harassment by IMA in December 2012 in connection with this case was considered
by its ethics committee and then by the BoG. "The BoG returned the minutes
to ethics committee with some observation," stated Azad in Parliament.
However, the
ethics committee minutes now available show that the BoG had not asked for a
review of the ethics committee's decision in June 2013 to remove the names of
four IMA office bearers for one year for harassing the whistleblower Dr Babu,
who complained against the endorsement of commercial products by the IMA.
Dr Sudhir
Thakur had filed a complaint before the chief information commissioner (CIC)
against the MCI for not providing the minutes of the ethics committee meeting
in which a complaint alleging medical negligence in the death of his brother
was considered. This was also the meeting that decided on the suspension of the
four IMA office-bearers. With CIC ruling in his favour, the minutes were
provided last month.
The documents
show that the BoG in its meeting on October 15, 2013 only asked for the review
of two items in the ethics committee's minutes and the decision on the IMA
office bearers was not one of them. In the following meeting of the ethics
committee on October 18, 2013, the minutes of the June 2013 meeting with
comments of the BOG were placed before it but could not be taken up "due
to paucity of time", according to minutes available on the website.
The newly
constituted MCI's ethics committee took up the decisions taken at the June 2013
meeting for review in its January 2014 meeting. This is despite the Supreme
Court clearly ruling that the ethics committee cannot review its own decisions.
It did so saying that the BOG had asked for a review of two items. However, it
took up a third item not mentioned by the BOG, about the IMA office bearers'
licences being suspended, and said it would seek legal opinion on this.
In the June
2014 ethics committee meeting, it was decided that the IMA does not come under
the jurisdiction of the MCI. Thus it overturned the earlier ethics committee decision
to suspend the licence of IMA office bearers found guilty of harassment of a
whistleblower. Incidentally, the ethics committee meeting in June 2014 included
four people Dr Sudipta Kumar Ray, Dr Vinay Kumar Aggarwal, Dr Ajay Kumar and
Dr KK Aggarwal who were part of the central working committee meeting of the
IMA held in Puri in April 2008 which ratified the decision to endorse
commercial products in return for Rs 2 crore from the companies.
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