The Government of India is planning to add a year to its undergraduate MBBS course. Presently, the duration of the course is five and a half years, but the Government is planning to make it for six and a half years, instead. On Saturday, Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad and the Medical Council of India (MCI) discussed the matter of increasing a year in the duration of the course by amending the MCI Act. The Government is planning to make a one-year rural posting compulsory for the MBBS students before they get the title of doctors. This proposal has not come up all of a sudden; it was also presented by the former Health Minister A Ramadoss in 2007.

In an interview with TOI, MCI Chairman Dr K K Talwar said, “It is not that we have cleared the proposal. This was discussed on Saturday. In another two weeks’ time, we will prepare a module on how we can make MBBS doctors go and work in rural areas. The ministry will then take a call.” Dr Talwar also stated that the proposal is yet in its planning stage and it has still not been decided to introduce the six-and-a-half year MBBS course from next year. If the present proposal is introduced then India could successfully get its 40,000 students working for the National Rural Health Mission.

According to Dr Talwar, “Medicine is a long career. One year of rural posting, in which students will be exposed to unique cases and diseases, will only do them good. However, the students will not be paid as interns but as doctors during that extra year of rural posting.” This proposal will definitely help overcome the shortage of human resource in health, especially in the rural sectors, where the density of doctors is four times less than in urban sectors.