Only 18.8 % are qualified in rural area.
Rakesh Agrawal ‘Ridh’
Health is wealth may be a cliché, but a nation’s i.e., health of its citizens are indeed its wealth and this depends on well qualified and trained doctors and India scores poorly in this regard as a recent WHO report reveals that an alarming 57 percent allopathic doctors didn’t have any medical qualification.
The situation was worst in rural India, where just 18.8 per cent of allopathic doctors had a medical qualification; meaning about 82 percent doctors are fake or quakes, described derogatively as jhhola chhap (loose clothe bag types) in Hindi. Interestingly, just 33 percent women lacked a medical qualification, while 62 percent men had.
Meaning, 57 percent of these doctors in India, are not doctors at all, just quakes, putting the overwhelming population, more so in India’s villages, at risk.
This also reflects on the education and training of doctors in India as this system has now in tatters and is plagued by rampant fraud and unprofessional teaching practices, exacerbating the public health challenge facing this nation of about 1.25 billion people. The notorious Vyapam Scandal of Madhya Pradesh where the policymakers were involved in fake degrees and admission into the state’s medical colleges, was just a tip of the iceberg as the rot runs much deeper as more than one out of every six India’s 398 medical schools has been accused of cheating, according to Indian government records and court filings.
The root of the problem is the low priority of the government for public health as The total expenditure on health as percentage to GDP for India is merely about 4 percent compared to poorest countries like Burundi which had around nine percent and even a major share of this expenditure is born by the people as the government’s overall support to health is just about 1.4 percent of India’s GDP. Health expenditure is 17.1 percent of its GDP in the USA, while 9.1 percent in the UK. (See: http://www.who.int/gho/countries/ind/en/)
As the extremely low number of doctors per million people in India: only 700 physicians per million people and most of them work in urban areas to earn good amount of money, villages are bubbling with quakes and both in cities and village, this noble profession has just become a money earning device with many doctors being simply unscrupulous traders.
And, more qualified doctors prefer to go for a greener posture, making India the world’s largest exporter of doctors, with about 47,000 currently practicing in the United States and about 25,000 in the United Kingdom.
Rural health infrastructures are even worst in tribal areas with an acute shortfall of 6,796 sub-centers, 1,267 primary health centers and 309 community health centers.
Unless the policymakers of India accord a priority to public health that it deserves and plug the loopholes in medical education, a majority of Indians, more so in rural areas, will remain at the mercy of these quakes.