B Krishna Prasad
Hyderabad
The thrust given to engineering colleges about 15 years back in the combined Andhra Pradesh (now riven as Telugu States) subsequently spawned so many engineering colleges and their graduates that today few people and organizations value their degrees with the result that most of these grads, due to lack of proper and gainful employment, have drifted to other available livelihood opportunities and have willy-nilly become delivery boys, cab drivers or taken up other jobs not even remotely connected to their qualifications. The YS Rajasekhara Reddy government then took the lead and was credited with contributing to the proliferation of engineering colleges, inter alia, by offering scholarships and fee reimbursements to these students.
Today, with TS Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao and AP Chief Minister Jagan Mohan Reddy launching 14 medical colleges in one go; let us fast forward 15 years and we will witness the same kind of dilution of standards in the medical field with underqualified and inexperienced doctors, a shade better than quacks, endangering people’s lives. For, each of these 14 colleges in Telugu states will churn out 1,400 to 1,600 medical grads per year or about 60,000 in all, thus making a doctor with just a basic qualification available everywhere around us but with no experts having hands-on training anywhere around us.
Experts agree that today the crux of the problem is not about the number of medical colleges or the number of doctors churned out every year, but the availability of competent faculty in medical colleges and universities as well as proper infrastructure for training the medical students to become experts before they set up their practice.
A look at the vital statistics in the medical field will make the impending reality clear. As for MBBS seats, today there are 1,08,148 MBBS seats (56,268 in Govt. /Semi Govt. Institutions & 51,880 in private/deemed medical colleges across India). This being so, even after three rounds of MBBS counselling by the Centre’s Medical Counselling Committee, at least 1,641 MBBS seats, including 483 in Tamil Nadu, are lying vacant across the nation.
Nearly half the vacant ones are All-India Quota (AIQ) seats. Besides, 872 All-India Quota (AIQ) seats and 44 seats from central institutions such as AIIMS, JIPMER and Aligarh Muslim University are vacant.Only two-fifths of the vacant seats (679) are paid seats in deemed universities and an additional 44 seats, reserved for the NRI category, are lying unfilled.
Parliament was informed recently that, thanks to the Centrally-Sponsored Scheme for the establishment of new medical colleges attached to existing district/referral hospitals, there has been an 82% increase in the number of medical colleges in the country— up from 387 before 2014 to 704 now — and a 110 % increase in the number of MBBS seats – up from 51,348 to 1,07,948, during the same period. Further, there has been an increase of 117 % in the number of post-graduate (PG) medical seats in the country — from 31,185 before 2014 to 67,802 as of now.
That is, the spree of opening new medical colleges has begun, with Telugu states being the latest example, though it comes bundled with a crisis: shortage of teachers. According to doctors’ professional bodies, teachers, and healthcare organisations, this has negatively impacted the quality of medical education with grave implications for the public health system in the long term.The delayed and tiresome recruitment process is one of the main factors for faculty shortage, going by the public statements of some of AIIMS’ faculty members.
According to them, there are enough doctors who would be willing to teach but job insecurity, low salary, no facility on contractual appointment, a lengthy hiring process, and indefinite wait for regular vacancy advertisement keep them away.Things have come to such a pass that all 19 operational All India Institutes of Medical Sciences are functioning with half the faculty they need – 50.7 per cent – and AIIMS Delhi, India’s premier medical college, is facing a faculty shortage of 36 per cent, going by official data.
Out of the total 5,340 sanctioned faculty posts, 2,547 are vacant.Three more AIIMS are set to start. Media reports suggest that rare and reduced interaction between faculty and students is causing mental health problems among students.A few years back, a batch of say 50 students at a government medical college in Kota, Rajasthan had professors who knew them all by name and face. Now, those colleges are expected to cope with 250 students and faculty members hardly know 7 or 10 of their students.
