The Central Government plans to establish a medical college in every district, said Prime Minister Narendra Modi on April 15. He emphasised that this was an effort to make medical education accessible to all. "The Centre is making efforts that there should be at least one medical college or institution for Post-Graduate (PG) medical education in every district," he was quoted saying in a PTI report.
The decision comes as a bid to get a record number of new doctors by the next ten years so as to boost the healthcare infrastructure. The goals to set up a medical college in every institution and to make medical education accessible to all would definitely help the country in having a good number of doctors, PM Modi had said. He had announced this while addressing the inaugural ceremony of the KK Patel Super Speciality Hospital in Gujarat's Bhuj district via video conferencing.
He also recalled incidents of how people had suffered due to a lack of medical facilities during calamities like the Bhuj earthquake. The PM stated additionally that even though many new medical colleges had already been set up at different places in the past years, more were required.
The Prime Minister's decision comes after a similar decision was made in Telangana by the Finance Minister of the state, T Harish Rao, who on April 12, had announced that a medical college in each district was to come up in Telangana by 2023. He had said that the work for setting up eight new colleges had already started and eight more colleges were going to come up next year. The Health Department had already allocated a fund of Rs 1,000 crores for the purpose.
