Medical education and research: India
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Medical education: India
Check on your doc before a check-up
Rema Nagarajan TIMES INSIGHT GROUP
The Times of India 2013/07/21
With the Supreme Court striking down the common entrance test for medical colleges, patients face the growing prospect of being treated by doctors whose merit may not have been adequately tested.
With the creation of more and more private medical colleges, many experts fear students will increasingly buy their way into becoming doctors from such institutes, many of which are notorious for their lack of teaching and training infrastructure.
These students do not have to face any centralized external exam to get their degrees. Exams are conducted internally, most often by private or socalled deemed universities that run medical colleges.
1 in 5 doctors bought a seat in medical school
Back-of-the-envelope calculations show that about one out of every five doctors passing out each year, or around 8,000, could be those who effectively bought seats in medical colleges. The consequences for public health are fairly obvious.
The ‘management quota’
Going by what is allowed under existing rules, nearly 15% of seats in private medical colleges across the country are in what is called the management quota. This term is widely recognized as a euphemism for seats available to those who can pay for the privilege. Estimates of exactly how much a seat costs vary, but the amount could be Rs 30-90 lakh, depending on the location of the college, its reputation and the timing of the booking.
Currently, over 25,000 seats for medical graduate admission are in private medical colleges compared to just over 20,000 in government colleges. The 15% kept aside for the management quota amounts to 3,750 seats. However, the actual quota is usually way higher than 15%. It could go up to a third of the seats, or in some cases, even over half the seats in a private college. Even a conservative third of the seats being sold as management quota would mean that over 8,000 seats are being sold.
Proxy students take the examinations
In a scam uncovered in Bangalore, it was found that qualified people were employed to write the entrance exams and such proxy students after getting allotment of seats through counselling would surrender the seat leaving it available to the management to allot at its discretion, which it would do in return for as much as Rs 75 lakh to Rs 90 lakh. This, according to several admission agents, is still a common practice.
All the money for booking the seat is collected in black and seats are booked as early as December of the year before the year of admission, way before any entrance exam. Of course, they stipulate that the admission is on the condition that the student gets 50% in class XII.
“With increasing variation in the quality of medical education and the unearthing of seat selling scams, we might need an exam for all medical graduates to test and certify their level of knowledge before they are to allowed to practice — something similar to the exam that foreign medical graduates have to clear to be allowed to practice here. Such a proposal had been made before,” said Dr Bipin Batra, executive director of the National Board of Examinations, which conducts the National Eligibility cum-Entrance Test for postgraduate medical education and the examination for FMGs. On grounds of bridging the shortage of doctors, the Medical Council of India has been approving the creation of more medical colleges and expanding the number of seats.
