NEW DELHI: In poll-bound Uttar Pradesh where nine new medical colleges have been inaugurated by PM Narendra Modi on Monday, the government is on a spree to start new medical colleges as the state had seen one of the worst crises during the second Covid19 wave earlier this year.
Inaugurating the nine medical colleges, PM Modi said that before 2014, there were less than 90,000 medical seats, including UG and PG, in the country while 60,000 new medical seats were added in the last seven years.
“Here in Uttar Pradesh too, till 2017 there were only 1,900 medical seats in government medical colleges. Whereas in the government of double engine, more than 1900 seats have been increased in just the last four year academic year,” said Modi.
With Siddharthnagar, Etah, Hardoi, Pratapgarh, Fatehpur, Deoria, Ghazipur, Mirzapur and Jaunpur districts getting the new medical colleges, UP now boasts of 57 medical colleges in all, second only to Karnataka as per the National Medical Commission.
Importantly, officials in the Union health ministry said that Uttar Pradesh, after Gujarat and Karnataka, will also be the third to start 16 new medical colleges under the public-private partnership scheme.
The scheme proposed by the Niti Aayog last year had urged the states to allow takeover of government hospitals in the districts by private players.
Under the plan, the private players will also be responsible for establishing and running medical colleges that can be attached to the secondary healthcare centres or district hospitals they get to control.
Karnataka and Gujarat had handed over a few district hospitals to private medical colleges even prior to the Niti Aayog’s push to adopt the model throughout the country.
None of the states, besides Uttar Pradesh, however, have come up with concrete plans to take the scheme forward yet.