‘Need to address ‘imbalanced’ growth of medical colleges’

The Central government on Friday said that 58 districts in ‘under-served’ areas have been identified for the setting up of medical colleges even as it admitted that there has been ‘imbalanced’ growth of such institutes in the country.

The government had made amendments in rules ‘to address the geographical and rural-urban imbalance’, health minister Harsh Vardhan on Friday told Lok Sabha while remarking that the healthcare delivery in the country has been marred by skewed growth.

A maximum of seven new medical colleges each will come up in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan followed by five each in Jammu and Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Odisha, four in Assam and three each in Bihar, Jharkhand and Himachal Pradesh, he said.

There are presently 404 medical colleges in the country with a cumulative 54,079 MBBS seats, Vardhan added. The number of government and private colleges are 189 and 215, respectively, with 25,624 and 28,455 seats.

However, stating that 46 medical colleges with a total of 3,920 MBBS seats had not received renewal of permission for 2014-15, Vardhan noted that the ‘actual availability of seats will be less’.

The minister also informed the House that the government has from time to time issuing repeated circulars/ instructions to all Central government hospitals, CGHS dispensaries and the state governments for encouraging doctors to prescribe generic medicines to the maximum extent possible. 

‘Instructions have also been issued that all central government hospitals must provide only good quality generic medicines, and that whenever any branded medicine is prescribed, it shall invariably also be mentioned that any other equivalent generic medicines could also be provided, ‘ he said.