With the war in Ukraine taking the first “Indian toll” in the form of an MBBS student from Karnataka, the thousands of families that have sent their children there are having nightmares as to what will happen next and how safe are their besieged children. While India is organising evacuation flights in the past one week, it has been a slow process and over a thousand students have been brought back via Air India flights. Air India is no more a government entity and the government has its limitations, also as the airlift is done free. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Modi asked the Air Force to step in with help.
In sharp focus is the question as to why students from India go all the way to Ukraine, or China to take an MBBS degree –after which they have to come and pass a test here to start the practice. The PM has advised students to avoid going to “smaller nations” to take degrees like MBBS. What the PM might not know is that Ukraine is more developed than India in many respects including in the medical education sector or in the matter of roads and other infrastructure. Ukraine was the second most important province after Russia in the USSR. Its medical institutions are a sight to watch; and the degrees from there are well-respected and accepted in the UK and other European nations too. Our sense of superiority is often misguided. This is true of the higher education sector as a whole where, even with huge salaries paid under UGC regime, the standards of our universities are going from bad to worse, not vice versa. Year after year, in global rankings, one or two Indian universities figure in the world’s 100 best. The rudderless style in which India functions, despite the periodic five-year elections and installation of governments, is weakening each and every institutional mechanism here.
It is well-known that the MBBS graduates who pass out from Indian medical colleges now are mostly below par; unlike in the past when such institutions produced excellent practitioners. Private medical colleges charge a fee of a crore or more in India, whereas the best medical establishment in Ukraine’s, Odessa charges around Rs 30 lakh. The greed on the part of those who run the colleges here has also to do with the money they shell out as gratifications through backdoor to those at the top. As a result of all these, the number of foreign students coming to India is fewer. Even Africa now sends lesser students to India. But do successive governments in this country have time to dwell on these critical issues?
