Medical college boom brings along poor infrastructure, quality crisis

Over 380 medical colleges have opened since 2015 but students face poor infrastructure, teacher shortages, and substandard hospital facilities

- Musab Qazi

In January, students of Government Medical College (GMC) Asifabad, Telangana, boycotted classes. Set up in 2023, the GMC is short of teachers, space, transportation, even cadavers — everything required for quality medical education. The only change the protests yielded was improved sanitation; the college continues to struggle.

“We don’t have sufficient teachers,” said a student, asking not to be named. “Some of the lectures were conducted online by some other faculty. In the first year, 100 students had only two cadavers to work with. As there’s no college hostel, we are accommodated in what used to be the collector office and storage spaces. Eight people are crammed in a single room. The most important issue is transportation — we did get a bus initially, but it hasn’t been operating since September last year. The attached district hospital is small.”

The complaints are serious but familiar.

During her budget speech earlier this year, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced an ambitious goal of adding 75,000 seats in medical colleges — 10,000 in the upcoming year. She also underscored the unprecedented expansion of medical education in the country over the last decade — 1.1 lakh new undergraduate (UG) and postgraduate (PG) seats, a 130% increase.

The exponential rise has been possible, in large parts, due to a centrally sponsored scheme to upgrade district and referral hospitals to medical colleges. Of the 157 new colleges approved by the centre, 131 are operational. The centre's bid to open All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in various states has also contributed to the growth; 19 of the 22 planned national institutes have begun functioning.