Mumbai: The upcoming academic year has good news stored for the medical students across various states in the country with the Medical Council of India (MCI) announcing an additional 2000 PG medical seats with Tamil Nadu having the highest share followed by Karnataka and Gujarat.

The present situation in some of the medical colleges in Maharashtra in streams like MD (anaesthisia) has a grim scenario to offer. It is only once in two years that a student from the general category can claim for a seat in its medical colleges, which means, it calculates up to half a seat per year for these student-doctors.

"Seats in post-graduate medical education will go up by 2,000 by March end," said MCI member Ved Prakash Mishra.

It is without any inspection that the MCI is undertaking this step. This decision of the Council is based on the new formula that allows two PG seats to every college for every professor it has.

Earlier this ratio stood at 1:1 as the MCI allowed only one seat per professor.

In this expansion spree, Maharashtra could just be the loser as states like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, in the recent past had invested vast amount of funds in not only setting up new public medical colleges, but also in attracting senior faculty members by offering them competitive reimbursement packages and permission to practise privately.

Maharashtra has not taken any initiative and has remained inactive for several years as several of faculty positions in the state had been lying vacant with poor budgetary allocation for higher professional education.

"Based on the received information from various colleges about the number of faculty members in each subject, we have increased their student intake capacity," Mishra added.

The expansion will also be undertaken in a similar fashion in private medical colleges as well but only after an MCI inspection.

According to the MCI’s estimate, the student intake capacity for PG medical seats in the country will stand at approximately 16,500 after expansion with the Council already sanctioning letters for almost 1600 seats to various state governments.

Considering the number of seats before the expansion process, India stood at 14,260 seats in various PG medical streams.

The Maharashtra officials felt the need to prioritize the filling up of vacant faculty positions.

The state has also informed the MCI that it will in the next couple of years start post-graduate courses in its medical colleges in Kolhapur (which started in 2001), Akola and Latur (both started by the government in 2002).

"We will probably have the highest number of seats in the country, once we start PG courses in these three colleges," said an official.