Seethalakshmi S and Mathang Seshagiri - Times News Network

Bangalore, Apr 24: Fake campus, fake students, fake faculty. Patron for such nursing colleges? The state government. The task force on paramedical education headed by Dr C M Gurumurthy has come out with shocking revelations on the state of nursing education and has exposed the nexus between the fake institutions and the government.

This nexus, it says, has helped the colleges thrive for decades. Sample this: In 2003'-04, the Karnataka Nursing Council (KNC) inspected 360 institutions but approved only 30.

Overlooking the KNC decision, the state granted permission for all the institutions. Naturally, it is showing on the quality.

Not just the staff, even the principals are 'imported' from neighbouring states during inspection. Senior students holding fake M.Sc (N)/B.Sc (N) certificates are shown as staff; even the maternity and earned leave letters are cooked up!

Little wonder then that majority of the nursing teaching faculty do not have KNC registration. The lure of nursing education is so much that the state government itself has flouted its own norms by bypassing the KNC and the Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences' (RGUHS) guidelines to mindlessly approve new institutions.

The result: Karnataka with 294 nursing colleges has more colleges than the total number in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Maharashtra which is 240.

With the number of institutions swelling by the year, majority of the schools and colleges of nursing depend heavily on government hospitals for clinical training.

The Indian Nursing Council has a rule that a 300-bed hospital can have just one nursing institution, but in the 452-bed KC General Hospital in Bangalore, 71 institutions, including 31 nursing schools, are using clinical facilities.

In Yelahanka general hospital, there are 15 nursing institutions using clinical facility! With violations the norm, the task force has listed 180 nursing colleges as 'not satisfactory', because neither do they have the basic clinical facilities nor the staff.

Among nursing schools, 352 are branded as not fit. In other words, it means less than 40% of the nursing institutes are fit for studying.

After all this, during the last 33 years, KNC has not disaffiliated a single nursing school. Ditto with RGUHS which has not disaffiliated a single college in 10 years.