Proposed site of the new medical college at Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences. Telegraph picture

Patna, June 28: The authorities of Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences (IGIMS) are expecting to get Medical Council of India’s (MCI’s) nod in a couple of days to start a full-fledged medical college with half the capacity it applied for. The number of seats could be reduced to 50 from the proposed 100, as the institution failed to appoint the requisite number of faculty members.

IGIMS director Dr Arun Kumar told The Telegraph: “We are expecting to get a letter of approval from MCI anytime now. We were falling short of five faculty members for basic medical science subjects, including anatomy, biochemistry and physiology. Of them, three posts have been filled. The information regarding this has been sent to MCI, as they had expressed reservations regarding shortage of faculty members.”

Kumar said the number of intake could come down to 50 as the institution failed to fill up the posts of all the five faculty members,.

“We had applied for 100 posts but MCI will give permission for half the seats because we could not fulfil all the criteria. We are now ready to start studies for 50 students here,” Kumar said.

According to sources, the tertiary healthcare centre had first proposed to set up a medical college in 2007. It was inspected twice by MCI this year.

“We had six faculty members for basic medical sciences and five more were needed. We tried our best to fill up the posts but only three candidates fulfilled the eligibility criteria and they have been recruited,” said a source in the institution.

Experts said highly qualified teachers in these subjects were a few. The number of such persons is less and they often join private medical colleges in other states.

“A panel of 61 doctors was sent to us by the government to fill up the vacancies. Only one of them could fulfil the criteria and was appointed. Yesterday, another doctor was appointed through walk-in interview. One more was recruited earlier. Two posts are still vacant but efforts are on to fill them up,” Kumar said, adding that a separate entrance examination on the pattern of All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi, would be conducted for the admission to IGIMS.