India is all set to produce over 4,400 more doctors every year. The Medical Council of India (MCI) has increased the number of seats for undergraduate medical education by 4,452 from this academic session (2011-12). Around 2,650 seats have been increased due to the opening of new colleges. And, the rest of seats (1,802) came about after the strength of the existing colleges was increased. India has around 335 medical colleges - 185...

India plans to increase its allocation for health to 2%-3% of its GDP over the next five years. Public spending on health was 0·94% of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 2004–05, which was among the lowest in the world. Private expenditure on health in India is about 78% as compared to 14% in the Maldives, Bhutan (29%), Sri Lanka (53%), Thailand (31%) and China (61%). Union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad on...

While a country like China devised practical ways to deliver healthcare to rural populations by deploying its band of ‘barefoot doctors’ from the 1960s in a transitional phase, and then went on to expand full-fledged medical education facilities that enabled national coverage to a great degree, chronic shortages of doctors in rural India six decades after Independence remain a worry. The allopathic doctor-patient ratio is a dismal 1:1,722. Nevertheless, the...