North Indian states lag; Why health care in bad shape under Nitish Raj?
There is a huge difference between the claims of Nitish government and the reality regarding health services inBihar. Recently, in a program in Muzaffarpur, chief minister Nitish Kumar had praised the health system ofBihar. The chief minister even said that now people do not need to go out of bihar for medical treatment, butthe recent data of the Center is enough to refute his claim.In a reply in the Rajya Sabha, the Union health Ministry has said that bihar is far behind in the calculations ofthe National Medical Council in the matter of MBBS seats. bihar is second from the bottom in the list. BelowBihar is meghalaya in North-East. It is further said in this data that there should be around 13 thousand medicalseats in bihar, but at present it is only 2565. That too, when bihar government is spending 7 percent of the totalbudget only on the health department. The government had announced a huge increase in its health budget thisyear.First understand the story of MBBS seats...The National Medical Council has recently made a rule regarding MBBS seats. According to this, there shouldbe 100 medical seats for a population of 10 lakh. That means one seat for every 10 thousand population.Bihar has lagged far behind on this scale. The population of bihar is about 13 crores. In response to a questionin Rajya Sabha, the central government said that according to NMC, MBBS seats in bihar should be around 13thousand, but it is much less. At present there are only 2565 MBBS seats in 21 colleges of Bihar. If seen interms of population, there is one MBBS seat for every 51 thousand people in Bihar. If we talk about UnionTerritory puducherry as compared to bihar, there is one MBBS seat for every 1000 people. In the five southernstates, there is an average MBBS seat of Rs 7,000. Telangana, with a population of 3 crore 80 lakh, has 7415MBBS seats, whereas according to NMC there should be only 3809 seats. Karnataka, with a population of 6crore 76 lakh, has about 12 thousand MBBS seats, here too there should be around 6600 seats.