Day: September 13, 2013

This post is in continuation of my This is India ! Series (see here)

A group of parents sitting in a city medical college auditorium, facing a management team, appear to be attending an orientation session. A closer look reveals they are bidding for post-graduate medical seats. A parent stands up and announces he is ready to pay Rs 1 crore for an MD (radiology) seat. Another parent ups the bid by Rs 25 lakh. At the end of the two-hour session, the coveted seat goes to the ward of the highest bidder.

So highly contested have been the auctions for PG medical seats this year that the going rate for an MD (radiology) seat touched Rs 4 crore at a prominent Chennai college. It hovered between Rs 3 crore and Rs 3.5 crore for the same course in Bangalore colleges.

Successful bids for orthopaedics and dermatology seats varied between Rs 1 crore and Rs 1.5 crore. A paediatrics seat cost Rs 1.6 crore.

Parents find the auction disturbing. “It’s like buying property. The more money you have, the better your house is.”

A source says: “It seems only the elite can pursue some courses. What is also shocking is that students are a witness to this trend. So the student whose parent could not pay those extra lakhs is scarred for life.”

Reasons for the high demand are not far to seek. For the lakhs of students who aspire to specialize in radiology, there are only 683 seats every year. “The gap between demand and supply is enormous. The shortage is perpetuated so that the cost of seats rises every year” officials told TOI.

College managements, on their part, say their repeated pleas to the Medical Council of India (MCI) to increase the number of seats have been in vain. “If we admit very few students for some courses, the cost of their training goes up. How do we make up for that?” asks the principal of a college where PG-seat rates this year hovered between Rs 1 crore and Rs 3.5 crore. The huge gap in the number of under-graduate and post-graduate medical seats makes medical education costlier every year.-from TOI