The Pill For India's Ailing Medical Eductaion System

Medical education in India is mired with a host of controversies and is trudging along a rough path.

- Sanjiv Das

There are around 70,978 MBBS seats in 529 colleges in India. Of this, 269 colleges accounting for 35,688 seats are government-run, while the remaining 260 colleges accounting for 35,290 seats are in the private sector. While the number of medical seats has increased in the last decade, the quality of education has remained in question. Moreover, corruption in medical education is touted to be one of the major causes of concern. Private hospitals charging a huge capitation fee and donation. Although there is a tremendous opportunity in the medical education space owing to the vast patient load and a diverse spectrum of diseases. The increase also leads to a dearth of quality healthcare professionals.

The country requires 6,00,000 doctors and 2 million nurses to cater to the rising population. However, the doctor-patient ratio currently stands at 1: 1,457 people.

Though the number of institutes has increased, the ones which offer quality medical education remain minuscule. The curricula have remained mainly outdated, despite tremendous changes happening in the healthcare sector. The medical education sector has become a more lucrative business linked to large profits than service to society. The mounting corruption, suicides related to cheating for admissions, high fee structure among private institutes and more notifies us about the highly unregulated business of medical education in the country.

We approached some academicians and doctors to know about the causes of this debacle in medical education, the challenges that the industry faces, government initiatives and the way forward. So let's start by understanding the current situation of medical education in the country and how are students reacting to it.

The current scenario