Shillong, Nov 9: The state government has decided to create a separate recruitment board to be known as the Meghalaya Medical Services Recruitment Board (MMSRB) for completing the process of filling up over 500 doctor posts within the next two-three months.
Informing this after chairing a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma said there is a huge backlog of vacancies in terms of 176 vacancies for specialists and 366 vacancies for doctors as the Meghalaya Public Services Commission (MPSC) has not been able to conduct interviews and necessary procedures since 2017.
“Of course Covid was there in between but in spite of that also because of other recruitments in different departments, the MPSC was not able to conduct the necessary recruitment processes and interviews in order to regularize and to ensure the procedure for interviews and selection are taking place for these over 500 posts of doctors that are there,” he said.
Sangma said it is not that doctors are not working but they are working under temporary basis or on the basis of 3Fs and the process of recruiting them has to be done in a fast manner so that proper services can be given to the people and hence the MMSRD has been created.
“Hence, a proper recruitment process must be conducted and our efforts would be that in the next 2-3 months we will try to ensure that all the recruitment processes for all these posts are completed through the MMSRB,” he added.
Asked if the government would continue recruiting doctors through the board, the chief minister however said the government will review the performance of the board before deciding on whether to continue or not with it.
He said that the mandate of the board is to start the recruitment and regularize these existing doctors working under 3Fs and casual basis.
“Since for the last five years MPSC has not been able to hold the interviews hence the mandate right now is to completely do this process independently and once we see this first phase and see how the overall implementation by this board goes through then we will be able to take a decision after reviewing the performance of this board and seeing how the outcome is we will decide whether to further continue with it or not continue with it,” Sangma said.
“But I am sure that looking at the way the MPSC is quite overloaded and lots of examinations and recruitments are being affected specially doctors I mean all the recruitments are important and doctors because of the health reasons it is very critical and hence we are quite sure this will have a very positive impact and we can regularize everybody very quickly and then we will further take a call on further mandating on how this board should function in the future,” he further asserted.