According to a news article ( The Hans India, dated April 6th, Government MBBS seats to go up to 4315 with eight more colleges), there are currently twenty-six government colleges, which will increase to thirty-four. This is apart from the already existing and proposed private medical colleges. Such a mushrooming growth of medical colleges is a reason for intense worry for the health of the nation and individual doctors too.
The pressure to achieve a perfect doctor-population ratio has overshadowed the importance of providing these doctors with adequate training. In many places, there is an acute shortage of labs, teaching staff, infrastructure, and clinical workload, which makes a doctor coming out of the medical colleges deficient in delivering any quality to individuals or the community. The situation has become similar to the thousands of unemployable engineering graduates in the country, thanks to the unchecked growth of engineering colleges. This has to be one of the most shortsighted and bizarre higher education policies of all our political parties, without exception. It also reflects on the quality of our bureaucracy, which apparently guides politicians on such matters.
Governments establishing medical colleges solely for the sake of appearance, private colleges investing solely for profit, Indian families continuing to place a high value on the medical profession, and students seeking investment returns or emigrating abroad combine to create a complex situation that has dire consequences for society. There are exceptions, of course, but these only prove the rule of the absolutely chaotic medical education system in the country. Most teaching staff and students are unhappy. Such policies have the unintended consequence of accelerating the growth of the medical profession’s business model rather than prioritising service. India has some of the world’s best and most experienced doctors and hospitals, both in the public and private sectors. But overall, our systems for health delivery have remained weak.
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