Nagpur: The Maharashtra government has admitted that there are about 100 Munna bhais (
bogus doctors) practising in the state. It said all of them were on radar of the Maharashtra Medical Council (MMC) and postgraduate degrees of 53 were prima facie found to be doubtful.
The MMC had already acted against 20 doctors and four pathologists by suspending their licenses.
The candid admission by state medical education and drugs department came in reply to a starred query by MLCs Anant Gadgil, Sanjay Dutt, Ashok Jagtap, Sharad Ranpise, Amarnath Rajurkar and others.
Expressing concern over such bogus doctors playing with lives of the patients, the legislators demanded expeditious probe and stringent action against them. “All these so called bogus doctors are having MBBS degrees, but their PG degrees are not from the recognized institutions. We’ve already started taking action against them by cancelling their licences,” medical education minister Girish Mahajan informed the upper house.
Terming the issue as serious, Gadgil, Takle and Dutt flayed the government for not taking any strong measures to curb such practices. They said people consider doctors as next to god and if such elements exist, they may play with the lives of patients. They demanded concrete action within a stipulated deadline.
The minister informed that besides bogus PG degrees, many doctors were found to have submitted fake caste validity certificates, which were also being examined. “Many of them are from rich and influential background, and with surnames like ‘Shah’, had submitted bogus certificates for admission and other purposes,” he said.
“We’re consulting with the MMC and ‘College of Physicians and Surgeons in Mumbai’ to confirm whether the degrees were conferred by them. Documents of 53 of them were found to be suspicious and were being examined,” the minister said.
He said that directives to check documents of all doctors were issued to Nashik-based Maharashtra University of Health Sciences University. “We will not reveal their names before enquiry, but have suo motu started verifying documents and degrees of all medicos from 2011 onwards,” he added.
