The central government is planning to add 75 thousand new medical seats in the next five years. A blueprint of a plan is being prepared for this. At present, there are 1,12,117 MBBS seats in the country. Despite this, a large number of students are going to former Soviet countries, China, Bangladesh etc. to study medicine. According to an estimate, at present about 30-35 thousand students are studying medicine in these countries.
The government has set a target of creating 75 thousand new seats in the next five years. The effort is to increase the number of seats to around two lakh annually. Under the scheme, medical colleges which have good infrastructure will be given opportunities to increase more seats. This includes setting up new medical colleges, upgrading district hospitals to make them medical colleges, motivating big private hospitals to open medical colleges, etc.
There are currently 731 medical colleges in the country. In 2014, their number was 387.
