Santosh Medical College: Striking Faculty, Non-Existent Facilities

Protests by teachers at Ghaziabad’s Santosh Medical College expose gross mismanagement by concerned authorities.

In October last year, hundreds of teachers at Santosh Medical College, Ghaziabad, decided to skip their daily teaching duties in order to protest against the non-payment of salaries pending for over six months.

After protesting on the streets for over three weeks, the teachers were assured by the college management and the strike was called off peacefully. Winter vacations, scheduled for December, were cancelled to compensate for the academic time lost.

Protests by Teachers due to Non-Payment of Salaries

By mid-December, when the teachers realised that the promises have not been fulfilled, another round of strike began, followed by an announcement for vacations. If this wasn’t enough, on 9 January when the students turned up for their semester exams, they were told to return since both the teaching and non-teaching staff refused to join work. The exams were then postponed by a few days and the postgraduate students have since been entrusted with exam-related duties.

In October 2017, Dr VP Gupta, registrar of the Santosh University, had cited financial troubles as the reason behind delay in release of salaries.

The university has had some financial constraints because not all seats in the college could get filled, nearly one-third seats have been lying vacant this year. We expect that these problems are temporary and that they will be resolved in November.

Dr VP Gupta, Registrar, Santosh University to Hindustan Times

A faculty member who spoke to The Quint on the condition of anonymity said the claim is false, as MBBS seats for both 2016-17 and 2017-18 have been fully filled. He said only a few post-graduate and dental seats remained vacant last year, which is not an unusual case at any medical college.

The college claims to have “about 700 beds” and “is equipped with all the latest state-of-the-art medical equipments,” with “10 fully functional hi-tech operation theaters with state-of-the-art laboratories besides other facilities.”

A senior faculty member who spoke to The Quint told a very different story:

Forget laboratories and adequate instruments, there are not even washrooms and water coolers at the campus.

Faculty member, Santosh Medical College (on condition of anonymity)

The hostel building located opposite the college is again proof of the sorry state of affairs across the campus. Despite shelling out a fortune for both admission and stay at the college premises, students are allocated a cluster of old and unhygienic rooms which have far outlived their expiry date.

Since the college is located in a remote residential area, there are not many alternatives for the students. This ‘monopoly’ as far as the accommodation facilities are concerned allows the college to charge exorbitant rates from students, without ensuring the availability of proper facilities.

History of flouting the norms

• Teaching staff at Santosh Medical College, Ghaziabad, have been protesting against non-payment of salaries since October 2017.
  
• Second round of strike began in mid-December after the authorities failed to fulfill their promises; on 9 January as students turn up for semester exams, they were told to return.
  
• Hostels in abysmal condition despite the college charging exorbitant fees and enjoying ‘monopoly’ as far as accommodation facilities are concerned.
  
• In 2016, founder-chairman Dr P Mahalingam declared an additional income of Rs 3 crore in a case being heard at the Income Tax Tribunal.
  
• A 2011 Tehelka report revealed that the MCI rules with respect to bed occupancy had been flouted with the college registering occupancy of less than 80 percent beds.
  
• In 2010, The Indian Express revealed how a professor at Japan’s Fujita Health University had been falsely named as member of the Board of Advisors.
  
• College is known for its political affiliation; Chennai hospital is a joint venture of Dr Mahalingam (Kanshi Ram’s physician), Natarajan (Sasikala’s husband) and T Devanathan(former president, BSP’s Tamil Nadu unit)
  
• In 1997, a story, titled ‘Two-Room Colleges’,  revealed how the college began to function from flats belonging to the Ghaziabad Development Authority.
  

Violation of MCI Rules

Santosh Medical College and its sister institutions Santosh Dental College and Santosh Paramedical College are registered under Tamil Nadu’s Maharaji Educational Trust which was given the status of a deemed-to-be-university in 2007.

The troubles haunting this medical college, located 20 kms away from the capital, are not new. In 2011, in a sequel to its groundbreaking report “Where Munna gets his MBBS”, news magazine Tehelka had exposed the brazen violation of the Medical Council of India (MCI) regulations by the college.

The MCI rules state that bed occupancy, on an average, should be 80 percent from the second year onwards. This college, Tehelka reported, registered barely a fraction of that mark. In fact, so secretive was their modus operandi that the investigators were denied access to much of the building and office for a survey.

Political Patronage Enjoyed by the College

Apart from being in the news for chronic mismanagement and fiscal irresponsibility, the college owes its origin to political connections. Dr P Mahalingam, the founder of the empire, which also runs the Sharmila College of Nursing, Santosh College of Occupational Therapy, Maharaji College of Physiotherapy and Maharaji College of Pharmacy in Tamil Nadu, was the personal physician to the then Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, MG Ramachandran.

Government approvals for Santosh Hospital and the four colleges running in its basement came when AIADMK led by Jayalalithaa was in power. The hospital in Chennai is a joint venture between Mahalingam, Natarajan (Sasikala’s husband) and T Devanathan, former president of the BSP’s Tamil Nadu unit.

Dr Mahalingam, it turns out, was also Kanshi Ram’s personal physician. This political affinity is likely to have influenced the BSP founder to ask the then minister of health, AR Antulay, to grant permission to the Maharaji Educational Trust in 1992 to set up the college in Ghaziabad. Earlier, the Indian Medical Council (IMC) had refused permission in view of the college’s poor training facilities.

So benign was the patronage that the college actually began in Ghaziabad Development Authority flats in a peripheral residential area of the city, Pratap Vihar. In 1997, a story titled ‘Two-Room Colleges’, published by the Outlook magazine stated:

The academy is fairly clear about how it admits students. Pay Rs 25 lakh and you are assured of a seat. The only trouble is that the students have to run from one flat to the other for their classes. And lab facilities, according to insiders, are poor and training facilities near zero.

The report in Tehelka, dated 6 August 2011, suggests that Ketan Desai, former president of the Medical Council of India, who was removed on charges of corruption in 2010, ‘granted’ approval to the college during the academic year 2008-09.

Doubts Over Credibility of the Institution

Speaking to The Quint, students alleged that the college does not have adequate staff in most departments. The faculty list uploaded on the website, we were told, is dubious, containing the names of even former teachers who are no longer associated with the college. A student confirmed that the forensic department has only one faculty and two postgraduate students to assist.

In 2010, The Indian Express made similar allegations, when Dr Tetsuo Kanno of the Fujita Health University in Toyoake, Japan, who was named as a member of the Board of Advisors by the college told the newspaper:

I have had no communication with Santosh Medical College for a long time. I remember for 30 min or 1 hour more than 5-6 years ago. That’s all... I gave a lecture about neurosurgery. That is all what I did for them.

Case Against Financial Irregularities

In a 2016 case at the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal, Dr Mahalingam was forced to declare an additional income of Rs 3 crore (FY 2006-07 to AY 2007-08) and pay taxes on the same.

The reason given by the chairman for this wilful declaration was to keep in order his “mental peace and avoid unnecessary harassment” and “without going into the authenticity of the documents found.”

The proceedings, however, exposed other issues with the functioning of the college. On the day of the ITO survey, Kamal Kannan, Accounts Officer for the trust, stated that “the fee structure of students of management quota and government quota was the same,” in plain violation of the MCI regulations.

In 2010, the Debt Recovery Tribunal issued a recovery certificate of Rs 14,80,806,453 when the Maharaji Educational Trust failed to pay back the loan to the Housing and Urban Development Corporation Ltd (HUDCO) taken at the time of inception of the college. The trust appealed against the order saying it ran “a non-profit charitable hospital,” and had been unduly treated as a commercial entity.

The counsel for HUDCO had then responded that the argument for loan being taken for a charitable cause was a fallacious one, as the total property of the institution stood at more than Rs 12,000 crore.

The said properties are owned/controlled by the defendants or their children. This is a family affair only. Then where is the charity? Despite being a renowned cardiologist he (Dr Mahalingam) waddled out of his commitments time and again. 

Counsel for HUDCO

“The chairman hasn’t probably deposited the TDS deducted from the staff salary which is probably why we have been getting notices from the IT department. There are problems with our provident fund contribution also, since the last year,” a faculty member told The Quint.

The Quint’s questionnaire sent to the university on 11 January went unanswered. The piece will be updated as and when we receive a response from the concerned authorities.

Need for Transparency in Granting Approvals

For now, the strike has once again been put on hold after the chairman’s new deadline of 30 January.

Making the approval process more transparent and less vulnerable to favouritism is only one part of the job. There is no substitute to public education, especially for medicine where the cost of training is organically unaffordable for the middle class. Until then re-naming and re-packaging of the same antiquated bodies will only constitute as a cosmetic reform.

(Akshat Tyagi is the author of ‘Naked Emperor of Education’. He tweets at @AshAkshat. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)

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