India, one of the leading exporters of nurses to the Western and Gulf countries, still lags behind even countries like Sri Lanka and Indonesia when it comes to patient-nurses ratio and patient-doctor ratio.

With the selection of nurses being State subject, the Centre has asked the States to recruit enough nurses and better the working of public sector hospitals, which are badly hit by the shortage of manpower.

According to the latest official statistics, there is one nurse to 2250 people in India while in the developed countries the number of people served by one nurse ranges from 150 to 200. Even developing countries like Indonesia, Kenya, Sri Lanka and Thailand have a better nurse population ratio.

However, with the emergence of corporate hospitals nurse-patient ratio varies from 1: 5 to 1: 60 or 1:1000 in different institutions, with modern corporate hospitals having standing miles ahead compared to public sector hospitals, data with the Health Ministry said.

According to the Medical Council of India, the allopathic doctor-population ratio at present works out to 1:1722. The total number of government allopathic doctors in the country is 73, 557. There are 22, 273 doctors at Primary Health Centres (PHCs) in position in rural areas as on March 2006. As on January 1, 2007, total numbers of beds available in the rural government hospitals are 1,32,475 and 3,40,308 beds are available in urban government hospitals including Community Health Centres (CHCs).

As on March 2006, about 7.5 per cent of the PHCs were without a doctor, about 38.9 per cent were without a lab technician and about 17.7 per cent were without a pharmacist. In the CHCs, overall about 54.5 per cent of the sanctioned posts of the specialists were vacant, Health Ministry sources said.