AIIMS is now free to appoint its profs

The Health Ministry issued the order after a meeting on February 26 chaired by Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani, who is also in charge of the Personnel Ministry under which the ACC falls.

The meeting was attended, among others, by Health Minister Sushma Swaraj, Law Minister Arun Jaitley, Cabinet Secretary Kamal Pandey and AIIMS director P Venugopal.

Exercising its new-found autonomy, AIIMS appointed over 50 professors on March 11, the very day it received the authorisation from the Government.

The Government has, in effect, exempted AIIMS from a circular issued by the Department of Personnel and Training in 1999 requiring all appointments of the level of joint secretary and above to be cleared by the ACC.

The 1999 circular had divested AIIMS of the power to appoint professors as the Government had argued that their rank and pay scale was equivalent to those of the joint secretary. This made the AIIMS faculty—along with several former professors—to appeal to the Centre more than once to restore their pre-1999 autonomy.

Not only because of the long delays inherent in the ACC’s procedure of appointment but also the anomaly of bureaucrats and politicians deciding who was good enough to be a professor at AIIMS.

But the Health Ministry repeatedly rejected their demands. Sources told The Sunday Express that the change of heart came after AIIMS director P Venugopal raised the matter with the Prime Minister. The subsequent high-powered meeting of February 26 under the chairmanship of Advani was held to accede to the autonomy demand of the AIIMS faculty.

At the meeting, the consensus was that the 1999 circular could have legally not been applied to AIIMS. This is because the institute was created under AIIMS Act 1956 which provided that only the director would have to be appointed with the ACC’s clearance.

And envisages that other appointments be made by the Institute Body, which is, in effect, the board of governors of AIIMS. The Law Ministry gave a written opinion stating that an executive instruction such as the 1999 circular could not override the statutory provisions of the AIIMS Act.