Posted on July 16, 2015 from Delhi, National ι Report #14369
The probe into the Vyapam scam by the Central Bureau of Investigation, it is to be hoped, will bring to book those who have committed assorted crimes ranging from impersonation and bribery to murder. But Vyapam raises some questions beyond culpability in individual crimes and these must be addressed as well.
The scarcity of seats in medical colleges is the most obvious problem. A surprising dearth of ethics in society at large that transforms normal, pious, hardworking middle-class parents and clever youth who impersonate actual candidates to take entrance tests into criminals who pay and take bribes is another.
The failure of the criminal justice system to punish anyone over the years is a third. The involvement of political leaders and their family members in carrying out and gaining from the scam is a fourth.
Shortage of Medical Seats…
The CBI probe will not cover these aspects of the scam. But for purposes of creating a healthy society, these are more important than nailing the guilty in the scam per se.
Why should medical college seats be in such short supply? What is the great difficulty in increasing the supply of medical seats? Cost is the normal answer. But this is not satisfactory. Since students and their parents are more than willing to cover actual costs and pay bribes over and above that, cost cannot be the constraint.
The regulatory bodies that sanction/recognise medical college seats seem to be at fault. They have a vested interest in keeping the supply constrained, in collusion with managements of the colleges that already operate and cash in on the scarcity of their commodity. This scarcity created by regulatory design must go.
The simplest way to raise medical education capacity sharply is to allow or mandate most existing hospitals to convert themselves into teaching hospitals. A functional hospital is the biggest element of cost in setting up a medical college. An engineering college, in contrast, is easily set up with rudimentary labs and strong imagination that lets students and faculty conjure up equipment that does not exist.
Engineering education in India, in any case, is not about getting students’ hands dirty in technology that works but about getting a quantitative degree that will help the kid get into an MBA course. Medicine is different. Students need to have examined patients, studied cases and so on.
The paucity of medical seats, especially at Master’s and higher levels, leads to these seats commanding huge premia. Having got their degrees paying extortionate amounts, doctors then are easily lured into making money through non-ethical practices, such as prescribing medicines of drug companies that pay them best and ordering investigations that are of little medical value but fetch them handsome commissions from the labs that execute them.
The solution the government is implementing to address the paucity of medical college seats is to open new franchises of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. Instead, the focus should be on leveraging existing assets in the shape of functional hospitals by adding teaching and residential facilities to them.
There are no simple solutions to the other problems listed above. They are interlinked and have bad politics as the running theme. In India, politics funds itself through loot of the exchequer, sale of patronage and extortion, all carried out with collusion of the civil servants who get suborned in the process and can turn freelance agents of corruption on their own account as well.
…To the Seat of Power
Political funding should be overhauled to have transparent accounting. The beginning has to be with monitoring of expenditure at every level from the polling booth to the state and nation. Every party should declare its monthly expenditure each month. The figure should be open to challenge by other parties, NGOs, the media and other bodies. The Election Commission should moderate this dispute and arrive at a final figure. The party should then be asked to show the source of the income used to finance the expenditure.
Transparent accounting of political expenditure and income will clean up a whole lot of governance. Corruption will cease to be systemic and turn opportunistic, as in other parts of the world. This will allow the civil service to rid itself of corrupt practices and corrupt people.
The police and the judicial apparatus have to be expanded significantly. It should be possible to complete investigations and prosecution in a matter of months, rather than of years that accumulate into decades. The likelihood of crime being punished has some, even if not decisive, deterrent effect: aspirant PhD scholars will not pose as candidates taking the entrance test.
All this will contribute to creating amore ethical society. But a sense of being part of a single community whose well-being depends on the actions of every individual member, the bedrock of an ethical society, cannot evolve in a divided, hierarchical society where politics accentuates and manipulates divisions. The solution lies in better politics.
This article, written by T K Arun, was originally published in The Economic Times.
It is ironical that the above has been published in the Economic Times which is part of the Times of India Group.
This group is one of the most corrupt as far as political reporting is concerned and I had stopped taking this paper after its one sided reporting favouring the BJP during the run-up to the Delhi elections. I have still not allowed the paper (TOI) to enter my house.
Whether it is the Congress, BJP or any of the other political party, they are all the same and when we chose a person who has been accused of holocaust in Gujarat in the aftermath of Godhra, to become our Prime Minister, we deserve what we are getting.
If during Gandhiji's agitation for independence, we had people like Narendra Modi, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Yadav, Mayawati, Jayalalitha, representing the British, India would never have become Independent.
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