'454 districts in India do not have a medical college'

Mangalore, September 11: There is an acute shortage of 10 lakh doctors and 20 lakh nurses in India and only 188 districts have medical colleges. There is not a single medical college in 454 districts across the nation, said Dr S Ramananda Shetty, vice-chancellor of Nitte University here on Monday.

Delivering the Foundation Day lecture of Mangalore University here, Dr Ramananda Shetty explained why India is lagging in the health sector. India has 315 medical colleges and it produces 36,000 MBBS graduates every year while China with 188 colleges produces 1.75 lakh doctors every year. "We have a fantastic education policy but we have failed to implement it," he added.

Stating that India's progress has been slow in the higher education sector, Dr Ramananda said the education policy framed in 1968 was implemented in 1986. Randomly increasing number of universities may affect quality education. What is needed is autonomy for universities and academic freedom, he said.

Throwing light on why higher education has not developed in India, he said professional institutions are finding it difficult to satisfy the norms of regulatory bodies like Medical Council of India, Nursing Council of India and eight other regulatory bodies. "Professional educational institutions are over governed here," he pointed out.

In 1964, Kothari Committee recommended that the government earmark 6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) but today sadly our GDP is only 3.5 percent, of which only 0.66 percent is earmarked for education. Universities are suffering due to lack of funds, he said.

Earlier during the programme, Dr Ramananda and MU vice chancellor TC Shivashankara Murthy distributed laptops to MU faculty and launched internet protocol facility in the postgraduate departments of MU. Shivashankara Murthy said that implementation of instrumentation technology is the need of the hour for universities.