M A I N   N E W S

TRIBUNE EXCLUSIVE
Search panel ready; race for PGI top post begins
24 applicants in the fray; twelve from PGI, Chandigarh; five from AIIMS
Aditi Tandon
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, February 7
The process for the appointment of the 11th director of the premier Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER), Chandigarh, has begun with the Centre constituting a special selection committee to find a suitable candidate.

Twentyfour top medics from the country, including 12 from the PGI and five from AIIMS, New Delhi, have applied for the coveted post which falls vacant after the serving director, Dr KK Talwar, retires on May 1 this year.

The high-level eight-member selection committee will be chaired by Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad. Five of its members are government nominees — the minister himself; Union Health Secretary K. Chandramauli; Director General, Health Services, R.K. Srivastav; Secretary, Medical Research, V.M. Katoch; and Director, NIMHANS, Bangalore, Satish Chandra. NIMHANS is a deemed university under the Health Ministry. It was last year named an Institute of National Importance.

Among the private members in the committee are Dr Rajan A. Badwe, Director, Tata Memorial Centre and Cancer Research Institute, Mumbai; N.K. Ganguly, President, JIPMER, Puducherry; and Seyed E. Hasnain, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hyderabad.

Dr Badwe, also chairman of the selection committee of AIIMS, is a reputed surgical oncologist. He was part of the team that earlier operated upon the Health Minister’s wife, afflicted with oral cancer. N.K. Ganguly is a familiar face on government-appointed selection panels and was also part of the selection committee that earlier appointed Dr R.C. Deka as the director of AIIMS.

Though most nominees in the selection committee for the director of the PGI are those who served on the selection panel for the director of AIIMS in 2009, a conspicuous deletion from the list is Rajagopala Chidambaram, Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government. Chidambaram as a member of the AIIMS director search panel in 2009 had given a note of dissent against the appointment of Dr Deka and in favour of the present chairperson of the MCI Board of Governors, Dr S.K. Sarin.

The new search panel will meet shortly to zero in on the suitable candidates for the post of PGI director, for which 24 applications have been received.

Among them 12 are doctors currently serving at the PGI, namely Binoy Sakhuja, dean and head of department of nephrology; Amod Gupta, sub-dean and head of ophthalmology; Kartar Singh, head of gastroenterology; P. Kulhara, head of psychiatry; Dr SK Jindal, head of pulmonary medicine; Dr AK Gupta, PGI’s medical superintendent; Savita Malhotra, professor, psychiatry; Arvind Rajvanshi, head of cytology; S. Prabhakar, head of neurology; Subhash Verma, head of internal medicine; Y. Chawla of the department of hepatology; and D. Behera, professor, pulmonary medicine, and director, LRS Institute of TB and Respiratory Diseases, New Delhi.

Among the applicant from AIIMS are NR Vishwas, professor of pharmacology; Devesh Gupta, head of paediatric surgery; SK Sharma, head of medicine; AK Mahapatra, head of neurosurgery; and Vinod Paul, professor of pediatrics.

From Chandigarh, Dr Raj Bahadur; director-principal, GMCH-32, has also applied. Other applicants include Lt Gen PP Bath, principal of AFMC, Pune; Pramod Kumar, dean of a medical college at Rajkot; Sunil Kumar, professor of surgery, GTB Hospital, New Delhi; RK Yadav, head of radiology, PGIMS, Rohtak; Bimal Sikri, principal, Convent Dental College, Amritsar; and D Mahapatra, principal, Institute of Medical Sciences, BHU, Banaras.