Bureaucratic Vandalism at IGMC Shimla: Medical Faculty Warns of Looming NMC De-recognition and Patient Care Disaster Over Thoughtless Shifts forcing medical fraternity on warpath.
SHIMLA — In an unprecedented confrontation, senior professors, specialist doctors, and the apex faculty body of Himachal Pradesh’s premier healthcare institution have launched a scathing attack on the state government’s reckless bid to carve up Indira Gandhi Medical College (IGMC) Shimla to prop up the newly constructed Atal Institute of Medical Super Specialties (AIMSS) at Chamiana.
The State Association of Medical and Dental College Teachers (SAMDCOT) warned that the Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu-led administration’s ill-advised decision to spin Chamiana into an isolated teaching college amounts to institutional vandalism, threatening to tear apart a 60-year-old medical legacy- IGMC- without any rational healthcare strategy.
By thoughtlessly uprooting senior clinicians, vital equipment, and functional units from IGMC, the government is not creating new medical infrastructure.
It is merely redistributing staff shortages and manufacturing an administrative disaster across both hospitals.
"Healthcare development in Himachal Pradesh should aim to multiply institutional strength, not divide existing assets," SAMDCOT firmly declared, blasting the health department for executing unilateral transfers without consulting department heads or assessing operational capacities.
A major statutory and academic catastrophe now stares Himachal Pradesh in the face, as Chamiana possesses neither independent accreditation nor statutory sanction from the National Medical Commission (NMC)—the country’s apex regulatory body—to function as an autonomous medical college. In fact super-specialties were intrinsically part and parcel of the IGMC.
Now reckless decisions are ruining both hospitals, warned the medical professionals.
For a medical institute to achieve autonomous teaching status, NMC regulations strictly require an independent, fully-staffed campus, foundational clinical and pre-clinical departments, verified infrastructure, and dedicated faculty cadres.
In reality, advanced super-specialty students pursuing DM (Doctorate of Medicine) and MCh programs who are posted at Chamiana remain officially registered under IGMC Shimla, with basic academic departments artificially staged on paper at IGMC’s Lakkar Bazaar campus to clear mandatory regulatory inspections.
Shuffling established teachers back and forth risks dropping IGMC’s permanent faculty roster below mandatory national thresholds.
This, in turn , have put undergraduate MBBS and postgraduate MD/MS accreditations at immediate risk of de-recognition, since these very professors serve as academic guides for resident doctors.
The government's half-baked decentralization is turning patient care into a nightmare. It has forced patients, the elderly, and grieving families into a harrowing shuttle between two campuses separated by over ten kilometers of congested mountain roads.
Medical bodies pointed out that this blunder mirrors the administrative fiasco witnessed during past realignments of gynecology services between Kamla Nehru Hospital (KNH) and IGMC, where patients were left stranded amidst bureaucratic high handedness. High Court intervened and expert committee also recommended the status quo.
With vital diagnostic tools, lab setups, and patient beds fractured between IGMC and Chamiana, patients sent to the new facility find themselves ping-ponged back to Lakkar Bazaar for basic scans and tests.
In the absence of a synchronized referral framework, round-the-clock patient transit, or unified diagnostic links, this lack of planning has left critically ill patients facing lethal delays and crippling out-of-pocket taxi bills.
Deep resentment is also brewing across the state’s medical fraternity over arbitrary service disparities and the selective withdrawal of the Non-Practising Allowance (NPA).
The NPA is a compensatory payment given to state-employed medical educators in exchange for a total ban on running private clinics, ensuring their full commitment to emergency care, night duties, and clinical teaching.
SAMDCOT condemned the government’s arbitrary policy of stripping broad-specialist faculty of this allowance while retaining it for super-specialists, despite both performing equally grueling frontline emergency duties.
To compound the insult, the health department has denied designated Assistant Professors standard vacation leave, terminated official travel funding for mandatory academic conferences, and enforced an ambiguous "common cadre" policy that strips medical teachers of job security and institutional tenure.
Doctors are demanding a total reversal of the state’s reckless segregation, insisting that Chamiana must be integrated under the unified administrative command of IGMC Shimla rather than manufactured into a rival, unviable entity.
As per past government notifications, Chamiana was conceived and sanctioned as a dedicated super-specialty block of IGMC.
Stripping IGMC of its core assets to justify a separate structure only downgrades the parent institution’s brand and dilutes its specialized care.
Critics trace the crisis back to a flawed administrative move that detached core super-specialty units from the parent IGMC campus and placed them at Chamiana.
Public health advocates argue the government should have moved academic branches, like the nursing and dental colleges, to the periphery while keeping life-saving clinical care together.
Instead, the split has left patients in acute pain shuttling between the two hospitals across treacherous mountain traffic.
SAMDCOT has presented an uncompromising charter of demands to the Chief Minister and Health Minister Dhani Ram Shandil, demanding an immediate moratorium on all transfers, the scrapping of a disruptive two-month rotational shifting policy, and fresh, direct hiring of doctors, nurses, and paramedical staff specifically for Chamiana instead of cannibalizing IGMC’s rolls.
Following unanimous resolutions passed during its General Body Meeting here today, which was shared with HimbuMail , the medical teachers’ association declared that while doctors seek constructive dialogue rather than an administrative showdown, continued official intransigence will leave them no choice but to launch massive, lawful democratic protests to save Himachal’s premier hospital from bureaucratic destruction.
#SaveIGMCShimla #HimachalHealthcareCrisis #SAMDCOT #AIMSSChamiana
