Not a game of musical chair, RIMS Director : Making it to the news
- The Sangai Express Editorial :: August 29 , 2014 -

A view of RIMS administrative block; new Director Prof Arun Kumar (Up) and demoted Prof Sekharjit :: Pix - TSE

It should be more than clear to quite a number of doctors or health professionals working at the Regional Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS) that the post of the Director of this medical institute is more than just a chair.

In more than one way too, this post has increasingly come to be equated with one’s clout rather than expertise or experience.

To be sure there must be rules and regulations to appoint the next man to this chair, but such is the trend that down the years it has become more than clear that the defining criteria is anything but expertise and experience.

Like anything else associated with the Government, this post too has come to mean something much more than the chair of the numero uno of a medical institute functioning under the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

Such an observation aptly fits a place like Manipur where money and influence talk much louder than merit and diligence.

A place where hard work and sincerity towards one’s duty and vocation has taken the back seat.

No wonder then that merit and other universally acceptable criterion for climbing the ladder of success find no takers here.

A near perfect atmosphere for the culture of sycophancy to take deep roots at the cost of merit and diligence and Manipur today stands at the perfect cross road for such a situation to become a reality.

Or more specifically such a trend or climate has become a reality defining the place and the people.

Perhaps nowhere is this more pronounced whenever the Government has to make some high profile appointments and by any standard effecting the appointment to the post of the Direoctor of RIMS comes under the category of one of the more high profile appointments in public office.

At the moment RIMS appears to be at the cross roads. All the more reason for the authority concerned or the Government to make the right move.

For the last couple of years or for quite a prolonged period of time RIMS has been in the news for all the wrong reasons.

A place of learning should ideally be in the news for its pioneering work in the field of research and innovations.

This however seems to have blown over the heads of the people who matter at RIMS. It is not research or some path breaking steps in the field of medical science that have propelled RIMS to the attention of the people but its shoddiness and the ‘loud whispers’ that not everything is fine with the medical institution.

At the moment, the medical institution is making it to the headlines of the daily newspapers and news channels for all the wrong reasons.

It is not case of this paper to say who is on the right and who is on the wrong side of the road.

But it is becoming more and more clear that whatever step the Union Government may take with regard to RIMS is not going to go down well with all for there are deep difference, differences which are not of recent origin.

A more than enough indication of the ham handed ways in which institutions, more so Central universities have been treated in the State.

For the new dispensation at New Delhi to have any meaningful impact on Manipur, it is important that corrective measures are taken up in right earnest.

This is not a case between Dr S Shekharjit and Dr Ch Arunkumar but about where Manipur stands in Delhi’s scheme of things and correctly addressing the present imbroglio at RIMS is perhaps the first step to go about it.