Delhi International Airport is busy managing traffic coming from eastern European nations ferrying medical students evacuated from Ukraine. The tragedy which has befallen on the students, many being from the city and NCR areas, has sadly now led to the politics of evacuation.
First a narrative was created about the students being some kind of a despicable deserter who have left their motherland for greener pastures and now in distress are looking for help. This subsided once the government started the evacuation process, accompanied by a media blitzkrieg.
It led to the debate whether evacuations done under the Congress regimes were better or the one being done now. Incidentally, the biggest evacuation was carried out during the Janata Dal regime from Kuwait in 1990 during the Persian Gulf War.
Air India, then owned by Government of India, made a record for the most people evacuated by a civil airliner. Indians were evacuated from Kuwait and Iraq, after the latter invaded the former, which was followed by Operation Desert Storm.
About 170,000 people were airlifted from Amman in Jordan to Mumbai in 488 flights operated by Air India in association with Indian Airlines. This story was later made into the Bollywood film titled ‘Airlift’ in 2016 starring Akshay Kumar.
Now that the evacuation has started, it’s time to remember that those who were evacuated from Kuwait and other such places were never blamed for going abroad in the search of livelihood. Then why blame these medical students who were pursuing their dreams. The question may arise, why pursue dream in Ukraine and not in India?
The answer lies in the fact that within the government sector there are limited numbers of seats in medical colleges and of which 50 per cent are reserved for students belonging to quota categories. For such students who do not belong to the reserved category and despite a good rank do not make it to government medical colleges, it’s impossible to seek medical education in the private sector due to the prohibitive costs.
Ukraine, and even Russia and China, provide seats in their medical colleges at almost one-fourth of the fee charged by the private medical colleges in this country. Thus it would be absolutely unfair to blame them for the tragedy which has befallen them.
The uncertainty about their future doesn’t end with return to India. The government has stringent rules which would make it difficult for these students to complete education in their home country. As per the provisions of the National Medical Commission (Foreign Medical Graduate Licentiate) Regulations, 2021, the entire course, training and internship has to be done in the same foreign medical institution throughout the course of study.
This effectively means that under the prevailing rules no part of medical training and internship shall be done in India or in any country other than the one from where the primary medical qualification was obtained. That would mean that they would have to wait for the end of war and return of normalcy before they can resume education.
The way out could be that the government changes the provisions to allow these students pursue education in India. Even if the government obliges, there is no answer to which colleges they would be accommodated.
The government colleges are already bursting at the seams and the high cost of getting a seat in a private college may further spiral, given the demand. We have a major crisis at hand and we would do better by applying mind to end crisis than raise hands in adulations.
Sidharth Mishra
Author and president, Centre for Reforms, Development & Justice