Hot seat: Med students strike for PG courses

Full-time teachers at medical colleges have met MP Priya Dutt and celebrities like Shabana Azmi and are set to join the strike. Not wanting to paralyse the services at government hospitals, they are waiting for the government’s reaction, but are clear about their support for the cause.

“If teachers don’t join in the stir now, it will be too late to save medical education,” says Dr Shailesh Mohite, who heads the Forensic Science Department at the T N Medical College and Bombay Municipal Corporation-run Nair hospital. Also the secretary of the Welfare Association of Full Time Teachers, Mohite paints a dramatic picture that envisages established government medical hospitals functioning as primary health centres.

From 1,900 in 2001, the post graduate seats have come down to 411 today because the PG courses have failed to meet the MCI requirements. For instance, at Pune’s B J Medical College and Sassoon Government Hospital, an MCI inspection team found that the number of teachers for a PG course in biochemistry was less than 50 per cent and subsequently derecognised the course. “Only now have we been able to fill the vacancies,” says Dr Anand Malik, dean of B J Medical College.

Of the nearly 4,000 medical undergraduate seats in the state, only 1,200-1,400 are in the government medical colleges, where the fees start at Rs 18,000. On the other hand, the fees for private medical colleges is nothing less than Rs 4 lakh a year.

After completing four-and-a-half years of undergraduate course and another year of internship, nearly 10,000 medical graduates are now applying for just 411 post graduate seats in the state. The competition is so stiff that according to Akshay Nair, a strike coordinater, even a student placed 42nd in the PG entrance exam finds it difficult to secure a berth in MD (medicine).

Little wonder then that Higher and Technical Education Minister Dilip Walse Patil has rushed to Delhi to meet the MCI bigwigs. Perhaps he will run into some answers to the overwhelming problem.