The much-awaited Karnataka's three government medical colleges in Raichur, Bidar and Shimoga are likely to commence from this academic year if the clearances from the Medical Council of India comes through.

The colleges were delayed to start admissions because of an acute shortage of medical teaching staff. The teachers were pressing the government to change the pay scales because several lucrative offers came to them from private medical colleges. The state government was forced to revise the scales of professors, associate professors, assistant professor and lecturers of medical colleges in the form of an increase in perquisites and issued a government order (GO) only to prevent attrition.

Now the state government has fixed the monthly emoluments of the professors at Rs 75,000, associate professors at Rs 65,000, assistant professors at Rs 50,000 and lecturers at Rs 40,000.

The increase in salaries was inevitable. It was critical for the government to start the colleges after allocating huge investments. There was a huge shortfall of teachers in branches of study such as anatomy, physiology and biochemistry. Most of the teachers were offered plum jobs in the mushrooming global clinical research organizations or private medicals or research wings of multinational pharmaceutical companies.

Although the three medical colleges were expected to take off in last year, the government faced serious problems to fill vacant posts in some faculties such as pre-clinical, clinical subjects, due to the non availability of candidates.

Qualified candidates who were appointed by the Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences were not keen to work in these medical colleges. The reluctance came about because of a pressing demand from the teaching staff for a massive revision of the salaries.

Even those who were working in the medical colleges in Hassan, Belgaum
and Mangalore where the first batch of MBBS students were expected complete in December decide to put in their papers since the government did not make any efforts to increase their emoluments.

The government had cleared the payment of the increased perquisites for all the categories of teachers in ten departments, which were anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pathology, pharmacology, microbiology,, forensic community medicine, radiology and anaesthesia.

According to senior government officials in the medical education
department, work on the medical colleges in Bidar, Shimoga and Raichur was complete. The Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences, has also appointed teachers in some selected branches for the important posts in these medical colleges.

Now the Government order will help to fill the vacant posts before the proposed visit of the Medical Council of India team which is expected in May end.