Bihar Govt to hire 31,000 docs without written test

Six months after Chief Minister Nitish Kumar suggested to do away with the practice of appointment on the basis of written examination, the Bihar Government is mulling over a proposal to hire 31,000 doctors without any written test.

All that the doctors have to do is to appear before Bihar Technical Commission (BTC) where they will be appointed on the basis of marks obtained during the undergraduate and post-graduate course. “They don’t have to appear for written examination or face interview. The BTC will verify their marks and the entire recruitment process will be over within three months,” said Bihar’s Health Minister Mangal Pandey.

The move follows after the State Government found that the process of appointment of doctors and engineers through Bihar Public Service Commission (BPSC) had often been caught in legal tangle, thereby disrupting and delaying the entire recruitment process. This, in turn, has led to a huge backlog of vacancies for many technical posts.

Last year on May 30, the chief minister had suggested to do away with the practice of recruitment through written test. “All we should do is to appoint a Technical Commission, which, in place of BPSC, would look into the academic records of doctors and engineers, besides verifying their degrees,” Nitish had said.

Now the Health Minister has echoed his views. “From the time of cracking the entrance examination for admission to medical or dental courses, an undergraduate has to qualify nine examinations before becoming a doctor. Is this not enough?” Pandey remarked when asked whether the government was not compromising with the quality and competence of doctors.

The move to hire doctors through BTC assumes significance in the sense that there is an acute shortage of doctors in Bihar. “Against the sanctioned strength of 11,393 in health services (including district hospitals, primary health centres and health sub-centres), there are currently only 2700 regular doctors here,” informed a senior official in the health department.