Less than a month ago I wrote about how a “corrupt to the core” Medical Council of India (MCI) was trying to make more money by blackmailing pharmaceutical companies with its latest amendment that made it a punishable offence for them to give gifts to doctors and sponsor medical conferences and medical education programmes. It also has threatened doctors with penal action including the suspension of their practicing licences if they accept any freebies from the industry.

My charge that the MCI was most well - known not for its contribution to upholding medical ethics but for its own corrupt practices was proved right when its chief Dr. Ketan Desai was arrested last week for taking a bribe of two crore rupees to grant permission for a private medical college to be started in Rajasthan. This is actually a very paltry sum which will certainly seem like peanuts when you consider the fact that he was not only caught and prosecuted but also convicted for corruption of a much higher scale a few years earlier. But since big money can always get you out of big trouble, he never had to pay up for his misdeeds.

On the contrary by virtue of the queer bye - laws of the Medical Council which seem to be tailor - made to protect people of lesser virtue, he was able to brush off the grime that was sticking to his image and quickly lever himself back into the Chairman’s chair. Thankfully for Desai, his arrest has been overshadowed in the media by all the excitement of the IPL bubble which chose to burst at the same time.

Although the CBI has seized many of his ill - gotten assets including a cache of diamonds in connection with the present case, it is unlikely that the charges will stick to his Teflon coating this time too. Not unless there is a committed response from the Central government and a committed medical fraternity that refuses to be governed by a tainted Medical Council with a tainted chief.

But while the government seems to be waking up rather slowly and certainly only under the usual fear of a charge of non-governance by the opposition, the medical fraternity at large still seems to be in deep slumber.

Unfortunately for us, doctors in our country have always been a much divided lot with strong personal egos and very weak professional unity. This is the biggest malady that has plagued the profession for ages and which has cost us many privileges which should rightfully have been ours today.

But thankfully, this time, there seems to be a tiny flicker of hope as a nationwide signature campaign has been initiated by doctors in Desai’s home State, Gujarat, against him and his amendments that project doctors as beggars at the doorsteps of the pharma industry. One of the demands of this campaign is that the name of Desai himself should be removed from the registry of the Indian Medical Council which if done will render him ineligible to call himself a doctor of medicine let alone holding any post in the Medical Council.

Sources from a medical association have been quoted in the press as saying that, “Many knew that he was corrupt, but no doctors or doctors’ associations could somehow come forward to demand that he must be removed. The worst thing was that he not only headed the Gujarat and Indian Medical Councils, but was also a President of the World Medical Association — and these key positions he held for a long time despite the fact that he was almost constantly under a cloud.”

All doctors also know very well that elections in the MCI have never been transparent at any time. A doctor who has joined the signature campaign says: "The election procedure for MCI needs to be changed with immediate effect; otherwise there is no guarantee that the next head will not be corrupt." But what is shameful is that while some splinter groups of doctors in the nooks and corners of the country have woken up to protect their image, the Indian Medical Association which is the largest and most well-known professional body of doctors in the country, has officially not condemned the happenings at the MCI.

It is a well - known fact that over the past few decades, medical education has become a very lucrative business that helps the managements of private medical colleges to make much easy money very quickly. This explains why all private educational societies with some means are in an almost mad frenzy to start at least one medical college each while the going is good.

While starting a medical college may be easy, thanks to the ease with which willing palms can be greased at the MCI, which is largely responsible for granting permission, it is not so easy to impart quality education that can produce good doctors, without having the required infrastructure. Since this infrastructure is not easy to come by considering the huge expense involved and the acute shortage of trained medical teachers, most colleges try to procure the mandatory recognition from the MCI by unfair means.

The victims of this leniency will be the students passing out of these colleges and most tragically the patients who are exposed to their treatment. Since disease is a collective problem faced by all citizens, producing good and capable doctors is a collective social responsibility if the lives of citizens have to be safe.

It is therefore essential for all of us to insist on having the minimum required standards in medical education. It can be said very correctly that one becomes a doctor not while he or she in a medical college but in the sea of patients that he or she is exposed to after coming out of it. But that should be the place only to polish the art of healing. It is not the safest place to learn it in its entirety as every tiny flaw in one's knowledge and every tiny unseen mistake can cost someone his or her life.