Confusion galore

The road to becoming a doctor has grown longer for Indian medical students who fled Ukraine

- SNEHA BHURA

THE FIRST PARAGRAPH of a 2014 research paper—‘Rehabilitation and Compensation of Migrants after Partition’—explains how displaced students and trainees were rehabilitated in India after the partition. Seating capacity in institutions was expanded, double shifts were introduced and new colleges were erected. “Students from colleges and technical institutions were offered loans, scholarships, and “exemption from the payment of fees was also sanctioned for the purchase of books, etc,” says the study published in the International Journal of Multidisciplinary and Scientific Emerging Research. The highest loans were offered to medical students: ₹ 100 a month, in addition to tuition fees.

Himanshu Shukla, a fourth-year student of Ivano-Frankivsk National Medical University in Ukraine, dramatically invokes the story of this rehabilitation to drive home his helplessness. “Even though the government had less money then, overnight colleges were created for students who ran away from places like Lahore,” says Shukla, on phone from his home in Lucknow. He returned to India on March 6 after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. Shukla’s Ukrainian friends helped him reach the Romanian border. He is trying to gather his scattered friends in Delhi so that they can start offline classes in coaching centers to align their lessons with the Indian medical curriculum.