Health Ministry approves of Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences Dental College

Bihar: After a long wait of two years and persevering efforts, Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS) has finally got the Union Health Ministry’s approval to start a dental college The college will start a dental course from September 2017 with 50 seats, RIMS Director, Dr. BL Sherwal announced this Friday.

“We were struggling to get dental course started in our already built dental college in RIMS premises. Finally, we got the approval today from the Union Health Ministry. We have already recruited 21 faculties for the course which is sufficient enough to start with and is in accordance with the Medical Council of India (MCI) guidelines. We are sure of taking this faculty strength to 60 within four years before first batch of 50 BDS students to be enrolled this year is awarded degrees,” the director informed.

He said that the college was already equipped with the necessary infrastructures, including building and equipment much before the commencement of the course. “Against requirement of 50 for 50 students, we have installed 70 dental chairs in the college, where nine departments of dental surgery will come into operation. We are pretty sure of recruiting at least 50 non-teaching staff before classes come into effect this year. To sum up, necessary infrastructures and human resource are not an issue now at all to start the course,” added Dr. Sherwal.

In December last year, the Council team had already inspected the arrangements made by the college for starting the new dental institution .The inspection at RIMS last year was done to by the MCI in order to satisfy itself on account of availability of teaching and non-teaching staff, infrastructure and other requirements for granting approval. “The team had put some observations and reservations before us to get the required numbers in place. We worked on those numbers, and thanks to our visionary Chief Minister who always took healthcare as one of the foremost sectors to take care of, Health Minister who never hesitated to provide whatever we required and our new Additional Chief Secretary who believed in speedy trial of files, we were able to overcome issues raised by MCI team and get the course started this very year,” Dr. Sherwal told The Pioneer.

Dental College Principal Dr. Pankaj Goyal also informed that the college will also apply for Master of Dental Surgery (MDS) course soon, with a target of starting the course most probably from next year itself. “We are working on that. We are also working on getting BDS seats increased to at least 100 soon,” said Principal Dr. Pankaj.