To evolve a roadmap for the direction of medical education in India in alignment with national needs and also to evolve a broad policy regarding the emphasis, duration and curricular changes that could be adopted as future strategies to make medical education in India comparable to global standards, the Medical Council of India (MCI) has developed a ‘Vision-2015’ document to reform the medical education in the country.

The main components of the Vision-2015 documents are reforms in under graduate and post graduate medical education in India. The vision document also aims to evolve strategies and futuristic plans so that medical education in India is innovative and is able to prepare undergraduates to be able to perform in the changing scenario of medical science. In the light of deteriorating medical education standards in the country, the document provides roadmap to work on parallel tracks for immediate solutions and long term improvement in a steady and phased manner.

India has the highest number of medical colleges in the world. This unprecedented growth has occurred in the past two decades in response to increasing health needs of the country. The most significant challenge for regulatory bodies has been to balance the need for more medical colleges with the maintenance of quality standards. The globalization of education and health care and India’s potential as destination for education and quality health care has brought the issue into sharper focus.

Curricular reform to systematically address the issues and develop strategies to strengthen the medical education and health care system is a logical next step. There is a need to create systems and standards that establish and promote state-of-the-art medical education, so that Indian medical graduates from all institutions are comparable to the best from anywhere in the world. Additionally, though recent advances in medicine have been understood and adopted by medical and other health science institutions, the same is not true for new methods and strategies in medical education. There is an urgent need to build capacity in this area.

To address these challenges, the MCI had constituted the undergraduate and postgraduate working groups in July 2010 to develop a Vision 2015 document.

Apart from several measures, the expert panel has recommended that the doctor-population ratio should be raised from the present 1:1700 to 1:1000 by 2031. For achieving this target taking into consideration existing medical colleges in the country, it was felt that the current intake of medical colleges and the critical mass of doctors should be doubled at least to achieve this target. The world average of doctor-population ratio is 1.5:1000.

The panel has also recommended sweeping reforms in improving quality of training and the curriculum of the medical education in the country.

The Board of Governors of the MCI has put the vision document on public domain till January 17, 2011for getting comments and suggestions of the medical fraternity, policy makers, professional organization and other stake holders.