The Government of India has announced that it is setting 58 new medical colleges in states with central assistance. With this move, 5,800 more MBBS seats will be added to the 50,000 already available across the country.
At present, India has a total of 381 medical colleges with 49,918 seats registered with Medical Council of India (MCI), the country’s apex medical regulator.
The Cabinet committee on Economic Affairs has already accepted and cleared the proposal submitted by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare for enacting new medical colleges attached with existing district and referral hospitals.
According to the government, the decision to set up the new medical colleges was taken in the awake of an increasing shortage of doctors across the country. The move, experts believe, will drastically enhance the number of qualified doctors in the country, thus improving the present doctor-patient ratio.
The government has also confirmed that the distance between the new medical colleges and their corresponding referral hospitals won’t be more than 10km.
P. Chidambaram, Finance Minister in the central government, stated that the central assistance share will comprise of INR 8,457.40 crore while that of the state will be around INR 2,513.70 crore.
The funding patter of states has been finalized on 75:25 for all of India except for the Northeastern states where it will be 90:10. The estimated cost of setting up a single medical college will be somewhere around INR 189 crore.
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