Forcing doctors to return from the US shows a state wanting to control, not cure

Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad has made a habit of courting controversy. In 2009, he claimed that electrification was the best form of population control. Indians with working television sets were likely to be too distracted to procreate, was Azad's argument. After identifying the contraceptive properties of television  which, he claimed, would reduce India's population growth by as much as 80 per cent  in 2011, Azad defined homosexuality as "unnatural" and referred to it as a disease. Both statements seriously called into question his own fitness to be health minister.

The minister's latest prescription is part of the same pattern  it is ineffectual at best, and retrograde in fact. Any doctor going to the US for higher studies would have to sign a bond to return to India after completing her course, proposes Azad, or be barred from practising in the US if the bond is not honoured.

That there are serious gaps in India's public health infrastructure is not a matter of debate. But barring the migration of medical professionals looking for specialised training abroad serves only to deflect attention from the real issues that plague the sector. According to the Medical Council of India, we currently produce a little over 31,500 MBBS graduates every year. With just under 10,000 seats available for recognised MD programmes, only a fraction of these students have the opportunity to pursue postgraduate specialisations in India. Further specialisation is even more competitive; there are only 545 seats across India for a DM, with oncology being particularly badly served, for instance, with only 33 seats. Medical colleges are mostly ill-equipped, suffer from faculty shortages and offer poor quality training. With such an acute lack of adequate training facilities available to medical students in India, it is unsurprising that they explore other options, such as the US, to pursue further medical studies. In fact, they should. Brain drain is as old and unoriginal an idea as the foreign hand. Stopping a graduate from going to a better lab or a campus overseas  except, of course, when he is a VVIP kid who can pull strings  shows a state desperate to control, not cure. But then why blame poor Azad when the rest of the UPA has gone retro?

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