INDIA’S commitment to meet the targets of provisioning universal healthcare under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 2030) and also to realise the aspirations projected under ‘Heal by India’ scheme where the country provides skilled healthcare workforce to meet global demands is heavily dependent on our potential and capacity in medical education. This is in itself pillared on the twin requirements of ensuring easily accessible and affordable quality education in various streams of medicine.
With an ambitious vision of leading from the forefront in adequately meeting our domestic needs for primary, secondary and tertiary healthcare services (across public and private sectors) and also those of other countries, the medical education landscape has witnessed a paradigm shift where the focus has moved from input-based to outcomeoriented approaches.
Landmark initiatives
The Government of India has, over the last few years, taken several landmark initiatives for reforming and rehauling the medical education sector in the country. As a pivotal step and a long-awaited reform, the National Medical Commission Act was enacted in 2019. The Act did away with the Medical Council of India (MCI) which was facing several structural and functional challenges and replaced it with an autonomous and transparent National Medical Commission (NMC), the apex regulatory body for medical education.
This Act has also resulted in lowering the cost of medical education by regulating the fee structure in private institutions. Restructuring of the medical licensing system, ranking of medical colleges and standardisation of entry requirements in all Medical Colleges across the country have also been envisaged in the Act.
In order to meet the requirements of a large workforce, giant strides have been taken to provide quality education to a larger population by creating higher number of seats.
Till some years back, there were only about 51,000 undergraduate (UG) MBBS seats. Notably, this has doubled to over 1 lakh seats in 2023. Likewise, the number of medical colleges which was less than 400 in 2015, has substantially increased to more than 700 in 2023. Even in the matter of postgraduate (PG) MD/MS and DNB seats, there has been a more than 125 per cent increase from about 31,000 seats in 2014 to more than 70,000 seats in 2023.
More colleges and seats
This has been possible due to consistent policy changes and support of the Central Government in launching schemes for establishment of new medical colleges and augmenting UG and PG seats by providing financial support.
The Government of India has also approved 157 new medical colleges in the public sector. Of these, 108 are already functional while the remaining 49 colleges are at advanced stages of completion. The funding for each medical college has progressively increased from Rs 189 crore to Rs 325 crore per college. This kind of largescale funding support by the Central Government for new medical colleges under a Centrally-sponsored scheme is unprecedented.
