Meghalaya- Recently, in a review meeting chaired by Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma on institutionalising medical colleges in Meghalaya, state Health Minister Ampreen Lyngdoh confirmed that the Shillong Medical College is likely to be made functional by September 2025 and Tura Medical College by 2026-2027.
For this, the Health Minister will soon visit Uttar Pradesh to study the model in which the Government of India had assisted the state government in setting up six medical colleges.
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Ampreen Lyngdoh said “we are ahead and progressing rapidly. If everything goes right, Shillong medical college should be functional by September 2025”.
However, the NMC is yet to come for the inspection and take details of the proposed medical college in Shillong.
Mentioning about the Tura Medical College she said “We have taken a review of the Tura medical college. We expect it to be likely operational sometime by 2026-2027. We are still working on a lot of infrastructure development because it is very necessary.”
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Speaking to the HubNews, the Health Minister said “We have a certain proposal at hand. We are of course going ahead with the constructions. Some of the infrastructures are at very good progress. Recently, there were certain hurdles with regards to the fast tracking of the infrastructure buildings, those have also been sorted out as Chief Minister at his level took a meeting with line departments like PHE, power and PWD so all of those difficulties have also been attended to”.
“We need to look at the building of our own faculty. We have to look at important issues such as the service rules, the amendment of service rules of doctors, so that we ensure that eligible doctors are on board and our service rules permits us to allow doctors to function as teaching doctors. So the government of India has a model for teaching and non-teaching doctors. There is a model for retirement and for everything, so we are now going to be looking at this detail as well”, she further added.
Talking about the Affiliation and teaching, Lyngdoh mentioned that “Affiliation issues are also likely to be handled because we have the Captain Williamson Sangma State University now, we have actually engaged with the NEHU but it is taking a very long time. So we are going to look for an option of affiliation with the state owned university". In addition, she said “We have had several consultations with doctors already in the system and we will have to open out expression of interest to doctors especially as we are told from the military background, there are doctors, who have just recently retired, who are eligible for teaching.”
Moreover, the Health Minister also said that “The CM is going to discuss these matters with the Government of India, we will await for the new government formation and as soon as that stabilizes, then we should be able to give you better information but just to keep you abreast on our plans for our own medical colleges, we want to assure the people of Meghalaya that we are sincerely on the job and it looks like we will be able to get a medical college, if everything goes as planned by next year, 2025 session”.
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