90% Maharashtra medical graduates pay up, skip rural stint

Times of India

Mumbai: The list of medical graduates who passed out of the Grant Medical College attached to JJ Hospital at Byculla in 2007-’08 says the whole story: only three of the 109 students took up the mandatory government service. The rest paid Rs 1 lakh to break the state government’s bond that requires them to put in a year’s work in healthcare facilities in the state’s hinterland. The story is not unique to JJ Hospital. It’s being played out in the state’s 13 other governmentrun medical colleges as well, reveals data collected by the Youth For Equality under the Right To Information (RTI) Act. The state government’s ‘one year or Rs 1 lakh’ formula has obviously not succeeded in providing a steady stream of doctors for the rural healthcare system as it was meant to do. But it garnered over Rs 9 crore for the state coffers in bond money collection in 2006-’07, admits a senior official from the Directorate of Medical Education and Research (DMER), which oversees medical education. But simple arithmetic shows that with a student pool of 3,300 medical graduates every year, the sum could well be more than double. But YFE, which has been fighting against any increase in reservation in higher education, interprets these statistics differently. ‘‘The information shows that it is not only students from the general category who pay the bond money,’’ says YFE’s Saket Kumar. Most students from the reserved category — be they from the OBC, SC or ST who get 100% free education — also skip the rural stint, he adds. ‘‘The government asks students to put in a year of service in return for the subsidized medical education they avail of throughout the five years,’’ points out Saket. ‘‘Ministers have held that medical students in the open category enjoyed subsided education (approx Rs 23,000 each year) and yet dodged the rural stint, but now we know that even those in the reserved category and those hailing from rural areas do the same,’’ he adds. At present, reservation at the MBBS level is 50% (including 19% for OBC, 13% for SC and 7% for ST). Take the case of GSMC attached to KEM Hospital in Parel. Of the 108 students admitted in the open category in the 2006-’07 academic year, about 75 paid the bond sum; 42 of the 48 students in OBC category did the same; 19 of the 23 SC students paid; and 8 of the 12 in ST category did the same. The state’s director general of health services Dr Prakash Doke estimates that over 90% of the students don’t take up government service. Barely 5% to 10% of the 3,300 students every year remain with the system he says. Dr Sanjay Oak, dean of Nair Hospital, states that he has noted the paying-out trend in the last two years and has pointed it out to the DMER.