Speculation is rife that the government has asked Medical Education Secretary Rashmi V “to go on leave” following pressure from private medical college managements, who were unhappy with certain changes to an agreement on seat sharing and fee structure, suggested by the IAS officer. She went on leave on Tuesday.

Incidently, the next seniormost official in the medical education department, Deputy Secretary K Vidya Kumari, was transferred on Tuesday. 

“Rashmi has been requesting leave for some time and hence it was sanctioned. Health and Family Welfare Principal Secretary N Sivasailam has been placed in command until the secretary is back,” Chief Secretary Kaushik Mukherjee told Deccan Herald. Medical Education Minister Sharan Prakash Patil said: “There has been no official direction to send her on leave.” 

Sources said private medical colleges were unhappy with Rashmi’s plans to make changes to the consensual agreement. 

Rashmi proposed that the private colleges should follow reservation roaster and include the Hyderabad-Karnataka quota, they should not collect excess fee from students, linguistic minority colleges should return unfilled seats in the linguistic minority quota to the government and not convert them into management quota and they should give subject-wise seat share to the government in postgraduate courses. At present, the colleges do not give seats for subjects like radiology, which are in demand. 

The private colleges, however, wanted the government to return the “unfilled management surrendered” seats to them after the counselling process. Rashmi is said to have taken a stand against this, saying once surrendered to the government, the seats could not be reverted to the managements. Incidentally, most medical colleges are owned by influential politicians, some of them being ministers.