The prohibitive cost of private medical education in India
The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine and the plight of an estimated 20,000 Indians studying medicine in the war-torn country have put the spotlight on the poor state of medical education in India. Approximately 20,000–25,000 students go abroad every year to study medicine. This high number is mainly because of two reasons. The first is that the number of students aspiring to be doctors far exceeds the seats available in India.
As per the data provided by the Medical Council of India and the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, a total of 16.1 lakh candidates sat for the MBBS entrance exam in 2021 against roughly 90,000 seats across the country recognised by the National Medical Commission. There are a total of 562 medical colleges offering MBBS, out of which 286 are government institutes and 276 are private.
The second reason is the prohibitive cost of private medical education in India. It costs more than Rs 1 crore for a four-and-a-half year MBBS course while government medical colleges charge only a fraction of that. But as most of the aspirants cannot get admission into government institutions and the private colleges in India charge a huge sum, studying medicine in Ukraine, China and Russia is a cheaper option where they can finish the entire course at only Rs 20–25 lakh.
PM Narendra Modi alluded to this problem last week when he asked the private sector to try and set up more medical institutes, and at the same time urged state governments to play the role of enablers and devise policies that can attract private investment. Clearly, there is an urgent need to plug the huge gaps in government and private education. Firstly, the government needs to spend much more on education.
The National Education Policy of 2020 had called for public investment of up to 6% of the GDP. As per the Economic Survey presented in January this year, the expenditure on education as a percentage of GDP was only 3.1% in 2021–22. As for private institutes, industrial houses need to invest more in order to provide quality and affordable education. This will not only address the problem but also cut precious foreign exchange outgo.