Do colleges have lower requirement for international students?

Why do we have so few medical colleges/students in India?

• Given the huge requirement of doctors for ever-growing population of India, why is it so that the number of colleges and number of students per college is quite meager?

• Answer:

  Opening a medical college in India is different than an engineering or an arts college or a general university. By different, I mean difficult, far more complicated and expensive, with the returns coming after some time. To open a medical college in India, there are some basic requirements that are necessary, apart from other granularities. I am listing down a few to give you an approximate scenario - 1. The only organisations permitted to open a medical college are a state (or union territory) government, an existing university, an organisation promoted by government, a society or a religious or a charitable trust. All of these come under various acts like Trust act / society act etc. dating back to the late 1800s. The organisations which somehow manage to pass all these acts have either opened up colleges already or are prevented by further granular requirements. Also, a private company or a group can also open a medical college, but they face a threat of the permission taken away if they get into commercialisation (!!!), hence very less chances of private medical colleges coming up. 2. The real estate requirement for a medical college is a minimum of 25 acres (only relaxed in metros), which is a significant piece of land and hence expensive. Also, unlike other colleges, medical college needs to have residential quarters and hostels for the nurses, practitioners and other staff apart from the students. 3. A medical college has to be supplemented with a hospital inside the campus of the college, with at least 300 beds and an infrastructure which can be later developed for educational purposes. 4. Medicine heavily relies on technical equipments which in turn are again costly (unlike low cost lathe machines / computers / breadboards etc.) and hence a big investment 5. The senior management / board of directors / dean etc. need to have at least 20 years of medical practice experience Given these basic requirements, opening a medical college becomes an extremely expensive affair apart from the difficulty of having all the requirements and qualifications met. The returns of the investments are also limited in the initial years and the companies are prevented from commercialisation of the same. This explains the less number of medical colleges as compared to other institutes. As far as students are concerned, the time required to become a doctor who starts earning some money to support himself is at least 6-7 years, which in no way equals the life style of an engineer / MBA who spent studying the same amount of time studying. These 6-7 years also don't guarantee you a stable income as you are too naive to open a private clinic and you either slog for 30 hours at a stretch in private hospitals as getting a job in government hospitals is close to impossible. Given the money minded economy of India and several other factors, students are choosing easier options than being a medical student to be able to get independent sooner and hence a drop in the number of doctors graduating every year. All in all, the situation is a catch-22 situation and a terrible one for the doctors in India