Over 80 per cent of India's medical colleges fall short in faculty counts or other teaching infrastructure but the country's medical regulatory authority has refused to list their names sought by a doctor through the Right to Information Act.

The National Medical Commission (NMC) has told K.V. Babu, an ophthalmologist in Kannur, Kerala, that the college-wise details of gaps in faculty counts or other infrastructure that he had asked for represented "third party" information that is "exempted" under the RTI.

Babu had filed the RTI application amid concerns shared by sections of doctors about the country’s increasing counts of medical colleges and medical seats without commensurate strengthening of the teaching infrastructure. India now has over 700 medical colleges, from 397 in 2014. And the count of undergraduate medical seats has more than doubled to over 1,08,000 in 2024 from 51,000 a decade ago.

While the Narendra Modi government has driven this expansion through additional funds and schemes to establish new medical colleges, assessments by the NMC have pointed to widespread gaps in their teaching infrastructure.

A parliamentary panel on health had earlier this year noted that an assessment of 246 medical colleges during 2022-23 by the NMC’s Undergraduate Medical Education Board had "revealed that no medical college had adequate faculty members or senior residents".

The assessment had found that most colleges had ghost faculty — a term used to describe non-existent faculty listed on paper — or senior residents or had yet to employ required faculty. In most of the medical colleges, zero attendance of faculty was common.

"A list of medical colleges detailing their gaps in faculty strength or other infrastructure would help aspiring medical students make informed decisions in selecting colleges," said Babu, a founder-member of the Alliance of Doctors for Ethical Healthcare, a nationwide group of physicians advocating ethics in medicine.

Babu had filed an RTI application last month seeking details of notices issued between January 1, 2023, and April 30, 2024, by the NMC to colleges for faculty or infrastructure deficiencies and college-wise details of action taken or fines imposed for their deficiencies.

The NMC responded on June 3, declining to share "third party" information.

The Medical Council of India (MCI) — the agency that preceded the NMC — used to post the findings of its college inspections on its website, Babu said. “It looks like the NMC on this measure is less transparent than the MCI,” he said.

But a top NMC official said the NMC has done away with the MCI's practice of inspections and now makes its assessments on the basis of self-declaration forms that each medical college is expected to submit to the regulatory body.

The self-declaration forms suggest that nearly 600 of the country’s 684 colleges for undergraduate (MBBS) medical seats have deficiencies and are therefore liable for fines, the NMC official said.

The type and the volume of deficiencies vary from college to college. "Some have 10 per cent, some have 50 per cent, some have 80 per cent — we want all the colleges to score 100 per cent," the NMC official told The Telegraph on Friday. “We give colleges time to address the gaps. If they don’t fulfil, we then impose fines. Colleges have started working on it (the gaps).”

The NMC on June 7 posted on its website details of faculty, infrastructure, and other requirements submitted by medical colleges through self-declaration forms for 2024-25 onwards, saying the initiative was aimed at ensuring transparency about facilities available in the colleges.

The NMC official said the public could correlate the details provided with the required standards prescribed by the NMC to determine which medical colleges have gaps in infrastructure.

Babu, however, has described the NMC's decision to post the details of each college on its website as “a mere pretence of transparency”.

An exercise to correlate the self-declared infrastructure of each medical college with the prescribed standards to determine which college deviates from the standards won’t be easy, Babu said.

He added: “What prevents the NMC from releasing a clear list of colleges and their deficiencies?”