Department of Ayush under the health ministry here on Tuesday came up with new measures for granting permission for opening up colleges from the academic year 2011-12 for teaching Indian systems of medicine. The move is taken to improve the quality of education in the Ayurveda, Siddha and Unani medicine colleges which will enhance the overall services provided by Ayush doctors.

Under the new rules, if 90 percent posts of teachers in colleges are met, only then the college will be granted permission by the centre as against the earlier minimum requirement of 80 percent. An addition condition attached with this is that at least one teacher should be available under each department of Ayurveda, Siddha and Unani.

“Ayurveda and Siddha systems of medicine have 14 departments each and Unani has eight departments. Under the new rule, each of these 14 departments under Ayurveda and Siddha and eight departments under Unani must have at least one teacher for the college to get permission from the government,” said Anil Kumar, secretary, Ayush department of the health ministry. This means that instead of the minimum requirement of 28 teachers, each college must have minimum 32 teachers.

The present condition for granting permission to Ayush colleges attached with hospitals is that there should be at least 100 out-patient department (OPD) patients at any given time of the year and 40 percent bed occupancy. As per the new rule, the hospital’s records like the case registers of in-patient department (IPD), records of medicines prescribed, pathological tests of the patients conducted, and whether the hospital is functional at all will be checked instead of getting the number of patients the hospital sees on a day-to-day basis. This way, said the secretary, the hospitals will not be able to inflate their records.

A minimum of 10 teachers as higher faculty in the rank of professors or readers for 50 students will be required now in Ayurveda colleges. Also, the government will now not accept any additional information the college provides after the day of inspection and will use a rubber stamp to seal the inspection reports.

The inspecting team of the government, Central Council of Indian Medicine, has also observed that many teachers work in more than one college which is not permissible according to the government rules. To counter this problem, Kumar said that from now on, salary slips of the teachers will be checked and not their attendance.

“If we check teachers’ salary slips, that way we can see for how long he or she has been working with the college and whether he or she is actually a faculty there,” said Kumar.

“We want to bring in greater transparency in the working of the Ayush department,” Kumar added.

India has a total of 311 Ayurveda, Siddha and Unani colleges and 188 Homeopathic colleges. That is, a total of 499 colleges which impart training in Indian systems of medicine. The government would bring in a gazette notification by the end of 2011 after which all colleges will have to follow these new rules.