Shillong, Nov 27: The state Cabinet on Wednesday approved the Meghalaya Health Service Academic Rules, 2024 for recruitment of faculty members of the much awaited Shillong Medical College, which will be made operational from next year.

The government is spending over Rs 16 crore to start the Shillong medical college, the capacity intake of which would be around 100 seats, at the earliest.

Informing this after the meeting, health minister Ampareen Lyngdoh said, “For the department of health to start making sure that we operationalize the medical college in the targeted time frame, we had to come up with service rules for the recruitment of faculty to run the medical college.”

“We were happy to do that and now we go ahead and go to the next stage to prepare for the operationalization of the Shillong medical college at the earliest,” she added.

The minister informed that the department has already tendered the various components of constructions that need to be put in place for starting the medical college.

“We already looking at affiliation, there’s a bit of a snag there, but we are going ahead, we are looking at option B option C, we have said that we would prefer to see, we would target to see that it becomes operational in academic year 2025-2026,” he said.

Asked, the minister said, “It has nothing to do with PA Sangma. This is our own State Medical College. State Medical College requires state service rules and like every other component of governance you cannot recruit, you cannot go ahead if you do not have a service rule in position.So, we are only concerned about the government college in the state of Meghalaya. As far as USTM is concerned to you remember we have already made public the details of operationalization of private medical colleges.”
She said that the government does not anticipate that there will be much complications in starting the Shillong medical college.

“Already we have in house doctors who are likely going to be able to enter into this service. So, we have a readymade faculty of course not all of the faculty will be eligible from within our own systems. We have also ensure that in the cabinet note we are guided from time to time, from year to years so that as and when we have faculty from within our own system, it is called the lateral system.

We hope that with the passage of time, a lateral choice will also be made available for the higher administrative post,”she stated.

The minister also informed that expenditure for the starting up of the medical college would be around Rs 16 crore.

On the status of the Tura medical college, Lyngdoh said, “In Tura also we are hopeful that we will be able to operationalize it at the earliest but I require a little bit of time because there are few modalities that need to be worked out and we will brief you accordingly as and when information is available for us.”

Asked, the minister said, “For Tura medical college also we are preparing simultaneously, give us sometime, we cannot make too many promises which will not be achieved.

Now, let’s like we said do one thing at a time but we are equally determined to also make Tura Medical College operational. I don’t want to commit because we still have a lot of things to do. Let us begin by telling the public that this is now likely going to happen.”

Further, the minister also informed, “We have asked the government for more land to make the civil hospital a more modernised building. We need to look at land be given to us by the government so that we can utilized these funds efficiently and make sure we have state of the art learning and teaching facilities to benefit students coming to our institution to acquire a medical degree.”

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