Every year, about 8-9 lakh students compete for about 83,000 medical college seats in India. The environment has become very competitive this year as well. 9,93,069 students have managed to clear NEET 2022 this year due to high enrollment. They now face another fierce contest for only 83,000 seats.
The number of seats is only 83,275 against 9,93,069 eligible students. This is the total number of seats in public and private sector institutions combined. Only about half of these seats are in government colleges and the rest in private colleges. This year, the number of seats is only five for every 100 students who pass NEET.
To make matters worse, several countries including China, Ukraine and the Philippines have yet to invite Indian students back to campus for geopolitical reasons including the COVID-19 pandemic. This has also forced students who want to study abroad to look for alternatives in India.
A look at the statistics below shows how serious and complex the picture of medical science education in India is:
Although setting up more Medical Colleges seems like an easy way out there are several policy barriers to doing so. The minimum requirements to set up a medical college include 20 acres of land and, as per the prevailing rules, the management should have been running a hospital for the previous two years. Limited land availability and high land prices are pushing new medical colleges in tier-3 cities or rural areas. However, rural hospitals as well as medical colleges have not been able to attract professors and doctors.
With the number of Medical Science aspirants increasing despite the almost stagnant number of seats, many experts are demanding that Hybrid Learn be recognized as a solution to the seat crisis in the medical sector. Since majority of MBBS, BDS, and related courses are theoretical, experts say having online or hybrid sessions for the theory portion and requiring students to attend classes for emphasis on practical and clinical practice can solve the problem. Currently, the government does not recognize online processes for medical studies.
The problem becomes more complicated until the Doctor-Patient Ratio is low. For primary care in India, this figure of one doctor for every 2,000 patients and one specialist doctor for over 500,000 patients is very low. Some of these doctors have to take on the additional responsibility of training medical students.