Page 60 - EW July 2022

Ukraine evacuees demanding admission in Indian medical colleges: uncertain future

23,000 Indian students are reading medicine in hostile versities).
China, 18,000 in Ukraine, 16,000 in Russia, and 15,000 in Moreover there’s a conspicuous regional imbalance in
the Philippines. These students had no option but to flee the availability of medical colleges and seats. The six socio-
abroad because of India’s grossly inadequate medical edu- economically advanced states of peninsular India (Karnata-
cation capacity. ka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Telangana, Puducherry and Andhra
Paradoxically, although India hosts the highest number Pradesh) and the western state of Maharashtra host 60 per-
of medical colleges worldwide — 596 — they offer a mere cent of medical colleges in the country, while the populous
88,120 seats annually for undergrad medical education. Hindi belt states are starved of them. The southern states
Conversely, China’s 420 colleges offer 286,000 seats. Un- and Maharashtra with an aggregate population of over 400
surprisingly, India has a doctor-population ratio of 1:1,456 million host 302 colleges which offer 42,000 seats per year.
(WHO recommendation 1:1,000), one of the worst world- Meanwhile, the two most populous states — Uttar Pradesh
wide. Behind this skewed ratio is a story of open, uninter- (220 million) and Bihar (104 million) — have 71 medical
rupted and continuous ideological confusion, poor plan- colleges offering only 9,168 MBBS seats annually.
ning, massive corruption and callous official disregard for “The one major problem that encapsulates all others in
the education and health of the world’s largest child and medical education is that only 88,120 MBBS seats are on
youth population. offer every year. That's far smaller than demand and social
In 2021, 1.5 million students wrote the NEET. Of them, need. An estimated 40 percent of these seats are in gov-
870,000 cleared it and competed for 88,120 seats in 275 ernment colleges where tuition fees are heavily subsidised
government and 321 private medical colleges — an accep- by Indian taxpayers, while the remaining 60 percent are
tance rate of less than 5 percent with 19 students compet- in private colleges where the fee ranges between Rs.18-30
ing for every seat. If one further splits available seats into lakh per year. The scarcity of seats generates huge demand
government (42,000) and private (46,120), the competi- for coaching institutes that help students to top the highly
tion is more intense because for middle and lower middle competitive NEET,” says Pranay Kotasthane, deputy
class students, the real battle is for government college seats director of the Takshashila Institution, a Bengaluru-based
which provide highly subsidised medical education. Tuition public policy think tank.
fees in the country’s over-subsidised government medical This demand-supply imbalance and middle class aspi-
colleges range from a paltry Rs.970- 1.11 lakh per year (cf. ration for the prized medical degree at all costs, have co-
Rs.18-30 lakh per year in private colleges and deemed uni- alesced to create, drive and sustain the Rs.126430 crore

JULY 2022 EDUCATIONWORLD 59