Names of 2 doctors for AIIMS Delhi director post approved by Institute Body; to be sent to ACC

NEW DELHI: Names of two doctors for the post of AIIMS Delhi director have been cleared by the Institute Body, the top decision making body at the institute, for being sent to the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi for final approval.

Randeep Guleria's second extended tenure as the director of AIIMS, New Delhi is scheduled to end on September 23. It has been learnt that the names of M Srinivas, Dean of Employees' State Insurance Company (ESIC) Hospital and Medical College in Hyderabad, and Sanjay Behari, Director of Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology, Trivandrum, were shortlisted by the selection-cum-search panel headed by the Union health secretary.

Names of Srinivas and Behari were placed before the Institute Body on Wednesday for approval and they have been cleared, sources told PTI. Interestingly, neither Doctor Srinivas nor Doctor Behari had applied for the post.

Earlier in March, names of three doctors, Nikhil Tandon, head of the department of endocrinology; Rajesh Malhotra, chief of AIIMS Trauma Centre and the head of the department of orthopaedics; and Pramod Garg, professor in the gastroenterology department in the institute , shortlisted by a search-cum-selection committee and subsequently approved by the Institute Body, the top decision-making body of the AIIMS, were sent to the ACC for approval.

The ACC had on June 20 sought a wider panel of names for the post of director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) here. Following this, names of MV Padma Srivastava, chief of Neurosciences Centre; Balram Bhargava, former ICMR director general; and Rakesh Aggarwal, director of Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education & Research, Puducherry were discussed.

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Srinivas was a professor in the Department of Pediatric Surgery at AIIMS Delhi before he joined ESIC Hospital and Medical College in 2016. Behari was professor and head of Neurosurgery department at Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences Lucknow before he took charge as the director of Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology in April.

The four-member search-cum-selection committee tasked with shortlisting names for the AIIMS director's post comprises Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan, Secretary of Department of Biotechnology Rajesh S Gokhale, Principal Scientific Advisor to the government K Vijay Raghavan, and Delhi University Vice Chancellor Yogesh Singh. The tenure of the incumbent Guleria which was till March 24 was extended by three months. It was then subsequently extended by another three months. Dr Guleria was appointed as director for a term of five years on March 28, 2017.