50,000 doctors are produced every year in India. A recent medical conference in the national capital have revealed a shocking statistics that over the last 10 years, 332 out of the 576 medical teaching institutions have failed to produce even a single research paper.

President of the Association of Diplomate of National Board (DNB) of Doctors, Dr. Jateen Ukrani have raised a concern for the medical science community stating that research is supposed to be the foundation stone of medical teaching and training. If our colleges are not producing enough research, then how can our doctors be efficient?

The medical education system in India is one of the largest in the world and 60% of the colleges are in the private sector. While the number of medical colleges in India has grown rapidly, there is still almost no published research work from most of the institutions where hundreds of postgraduate students write a thesis for their exams.

World Bank’s HNP (Health,Nutrition and Population) statistics have shown that one third of these doctors leave India every year for residency training and/or practice abroad, with around 1,500 medical graduates emigrating to the United States each year to enter residency training. The quality of Indian medical education and of the physicians has implications for the United States and the entire world.

Archita Singh, student of a government medical college says that, "The patient to doctor ratio is highly imbalanced and we are almost always overburdened”. Also, as medical students they are not promoted or even encouraged pursuing research. With 5 doctors per 1,000 people, compared with 23 per 1,000 in the US, the Indian doctors are always over burdened with patients. 

Dr. Anand Rai, in 2013, had exposed a massive fraud involving medical school entrance exams in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh wherein despite lacking sufficient research papers, students were selected to work as full time professionals. According to a probe by Reuters, recruiting companies, even in the present day, regularly provide medical colleges with doctors to fake as full-time faculty to pass government inspections.

According to the data analysis report of Index Medicus, India’s share was only 0.714% to the world research portal in medical sciences. As per Dr. Ukrani, there are two basic reasons to why Indian medical colleges produce less research. Firstly, medical curriculum does not lay proper importance on research. Only at a PG level, thesis is mandatory, and many institutes don’t train their post graduates in systemic research. Secondly, half of the medical colleges in India are private medical colleges. Mostly these places, infrastructure and patient load is insufficient to learn the art of medicine, so there is no further step for research.

There are two parallel post graduate medical education systems, the one under National Board of Examination (NBE) focuses more on research than the one under Medical Council of India(MCI). All DNB post graduates undergo thesis workshops in which they are taught systemic research and thesis is mandatory. It has one of the most stringent criteria for research. On the other hand, MCI does have thesis mandatory for MD/MS but there is also no training given on how to proceed on it and this produces fruitless researches.

Experts think that Indian medical colleges should focus on research as a mandatory part of the curriculum and organize research oriented workshops. Also, it is essential for the government--the policy makers-- to understand research and employ them to make policies.

As per the ICMR report in 2016, only four medical colleges among the nation’s top 10 global institutes have publications in peer- reviewed journals-namely - AIIMS, New Delhi, PGI, Chandigarh, CMC, Vellore and SGIMS, Lucknow.

Quality research is a must, to remain globally competitive. To improve the quality of our medical research, experts emphasis on the need to rethink the whole medical education system of our country and adopt restructuring which will encourage the idea of research amongst young aspirants.