>Unique AICTE number for students, faculty by April-end

>More than 5 million students pursuing technical programmes across the country will soon get a unique identification number from the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). The unique ID is expected to be issued to students and faculty members across institutes of engineering, management, pharmacy and architecture among others by the end of April. The aim is to bring in more transparency in academic and administrative processes.

“We will issue the unique ID to around 5.2 million students and around 300,000 faculty members by April-end across technical institutes approved by the AICTE. We have asked all institutes to submit data on all their students and teachers by March 31st,” said S. S. Mantha, acting Chairman of AICTE.

The unique identification number will have to be used by students when they apply for scholarships. They can also use the ID to download any software/service of the AICTE for free. Teachers will have to mention the number when they apply for research, seminars and travel grants. Again, for developing new laboratories or for applying for funds to start new projects, the identification number will have to be quoted by the faculty member.

“The unique ID may also help AICTE to keep a check on excess admissions, if any. Besides, it will act as a deterrent to illegal practices like the same teacher working in multiple institutes,” said a senior professor of management.

Further, as part of its initiatives, the AICTE recently started an auto-generated SMS service for management institutes. This implies that at each stage, the status of all applications submitted by a particular institute or status of each transaction, will be sent to the institute through an automatically generated SMS. This service has been started for 11,000 institutes initially and will also be extended to other technical institutes over the next several months.

Source: Indian Express, April 5, 2011

>MCI mulls sending doctors back to school

>Medical Council of India (MCI) is all set to send doctors back to lecture halls, failing which they would lose their license to practice. According to the new rules, which will be announced on today, MCI is planning to make it mandatory for all doctors to attend 30 hours of continuing medical education (CME) every five years. If they fail to attend CME, their registration to practice would be suspended. The maiden national guidelines on CME Credit Hours will be unveiled at MCI’s ethical committee meeting today.

Any paper published in “indexed national/ international” medical journals will entitle the author and the co-author to CME Credit Hours. Doctors pursuing post-graduate courses — like diploma, MD, MS, DNB and DM from recognized/ reputed institutions in India — will get four credit hours per year for the duration of the courses.

The additional credit hours will be awarded for participating in departmental and institutional activities like journal club meetings, mortality conferences etc. Medical associations or organizations caught issuing fake certificates to doctors — claiming they attended the conferences — will be barred. Doctors can attend international conferences.

CME Credit Hours will be awarded following the submission of attendance proof. If CME is organized by a drug / equipment company for promotion of its product, then it won’t be considered. Similarly, the ones organized by individual nursing home, hospitals and for marketing purposes won’t get any credit.

Dr. Arun Bal, Chairman of MCI’s Ethics Committee, told TOI, “We are ready with the national guidelines to make CME mandatory. At present, very few state councils have guidelines for CME credits. Only Delhi, Maharashtra, Kerala, Punjab have structured guidelines. However these guidelines are not uniform. For example, Maharashtra gives CME credits for papers published in indexed journals and for writing chapters in books.”

Source: The Times of India, April 5, 2011