Even as thousands of students in Andhra Pradesh are vying with each other to get the envious admission for MBBS, the state stands to lose as much as 800 MBBS seats for the academic year 2012-13 due to the lackadaisical attitude of the state government in establishing the required infrastructure in the government medical colleges as per the guidelines set by the Medical Council of India (MCI).
Earlier, the MCI had agreed to release additional MBBS seats to the state, provided the state government establishes the required infrastructure in the government medical colleges to accommodate the additional intake. But so far the government had not done much to fulfil the required facilities in the medical colleges.
Despite knowing the fact that the state would largely benefit with additional MBBS seats, the state government had done nothing to pursue the matter further with the MCI and there has been no sufficient follow up done by the health ministry of the state. This had led to a big loss to the aspiring MBBS candidates in the state. With only 4800 seats being available in 37 medical colleges across the state to a record 94000 applications for medical courses this year, the state government could have eased the situation by pursuing the case of enhancement of seats with the MCI, but failed to do so and this will cost the state dearly in the form of loosing seats for this academic year.
As there is also stiff competition among the students for grabbing the available limited seats, there are occasions where this kind of a situation is giving way to malpractices by students and managements alike.
Though the MCI has agreed to add 500 seats in 10 government medical college this year the state government had failed to provide the infrastructure and faculty for the purpose.
Also MCI is yet to give its nod to the proposals for giving 300 seats in the three new private medical colleges. If the government had pursued the case vigorously, this year there would have been 800 additional MBBS seats.
The demand for MBBS is increasing as there are almost 1 lakh aspirants this year. Over the past few years, it has also been found that there are a significant number of repeaters including students who are already pursuing courses in medical colleges.
Officials suspect foul play by the repeaters of resorting to irregularities like helping students to copy from them besides impersonation after collecting huge money from medical aspirants. In 2010, similar scam broke out involving the repeaters and wary Eamcet officials are busy collecting the data of medicos from medical colleges to ascertain the facts.
“We are thoroughly examining the details of Eamcet medical aspirants. The data will be cross-checked with the medical colleges to find whether the Eamcet applicants and medicos are the same. The data will be referred to the police and intelligence departments in case of any suspicion. We have decided to take the photographs and thumb impressions of all the Eamcet aspirants to check impersonation and malpractices of this sort,” said N V Ramana Rao, convener Eamcet.
There are also complaints of some medical colleges asking their brilliant students to opt for Eamcet and cancel their seats at the last minute without taking admission. The seats that go vacant in the last minute will be surrendered to the managements, enabling them to allot them to students of their choice by taking huge donations.