Issues like regulating fees charged by private medical colleges, increasing the number of seats in Government medical colleges and manual scavenging figured prominently in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday.
Raising the issue of plight of medical studies, Jairam Ramesh (Congress) said just about 53 per cent of all medical institutions in the country are government colleges and the rest are private whose population has been increasing over the last few years.
He also said relying on the private medical colleges to train doctors and meet the challenge of acute shortage of doctors is “deeply flawed and deeply dangerous”. The Congress leader maintained the private colleges practice the principle of “pay now and learn later.”
The government, he said, came up with the National Medical Commission Bill in 2017 that provided the body to regulate fees and all other charges for not more than 40 per cent seats in private medical colleges.