The National Medical Commission (NMC), sole body regulating medical education system across the country, has directed medical colleges to include Gazetted holidays, local administrative holidays and details of other leave, tour, vacation etc in the Aadhaar Enabled Biometric Attendance System (AEBAS) module launched in teaching hospitals.

The NMC has also threatened to take strong action against medical colleges if they are found not implementing the directive of the commission.

The commission was prompted to issue the directive after it came to note that the AEBAS data in respective medical colleges has been becoming inconsistent because the teaching hospitals were retrospective including the details of the Gazetted/Local holidays/leaves of the faculties.

“Implementation of biometric attendance system can be used as an effective and convenient digital solution to recording the attendance of faculties, senior residents, and tutors of medical colleges.

Therefore, NMC intends to implement the aadhaar enabled biometric attendance system (AEBAS) developed by the National Informatics Center (NIC) in all government and private medical colleges,” a directive issued earlier in 2022 by the NMC Dr Sandhya Bullar had stated.

The commission had also issued guidelines again in October in 2022 saying, “Faculty, Demonstrators, Tutors, and senior residents on leave or official duty must input such details into AEBAS using the ‘add leave’ and ‘add tour’ module respectively.”

On 13 June, the NMC issued a public notice stating, “Therefore, all Medical Colleges are requested to ensure that the data w.r.t Gazetted Holidays, Local Administrative Holidays etc be included in the AEBAS Module of the college in advance prior to the beginning of the calendar year/semester concerned.

Further, the Medical Colleges are also requested to include the details of the leave/tour/vacation etc.”

The commission has already imposed monetary penalties of Rs 10 lakh on many medical colleges in West Bengal and other states for not following AEBAS module. It has also observed poor biometric attendance of doctors, inadequate infrastructure facilities required for a medical college etc during its latest assessments on the teaching hospital across the country.