New Delhi: From the coming academic year, the centre has approved an additional 3,791 post-graduate medical seats in colleges in order to meet the growing shortage of doctors.

To meet the health needs of its 1.17 billion people, India needs at least 50,000 medical graduates and 18,000 post-graduates every year in contrast to which it has only 35,202 medical college seats at graduate level and 13,503 at the PG level.

The standard set by the World Health Organization (WHO) is one doctor for every 1,500 people but the current scenario in the country is one for every 2,800 people.

Increasing the number of seats at the undergraduate level is not possible until there are enough post-graduates and specialists to teach them due to which the number of PG seats has been escalated to 17,294.

"With the escalation on the number of PG seats, appropriate number of teachers would be required to teach. Once we are able to fulfill the faculty requirement to teach the medical students, we can easily think of expanding the MBBS seats," said the health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad.

The proposed PG seats will be an addition to the existing in the premier All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) which is 188 at present and the Post Graduate Institute Chandigarh standing at 220.

The Medical Council of India (MCI) regulates 300 medical colleges under its umbrella in India out of which 143 are run by government.

Azad further added that, "After getting the central assistance worth Rs.1,350 crore a programme for the upgradation of state government medical colleges has also been approved."

Dr. Ketan Desai, president, MCI said that, "Now one professor can guide two PG students as the professor-student ratio has now improved to 1:2 from 1:1 earlier."

However, with the announcement of the increase in the number of PG seats there also came another rationalization from the Indian Medical Council (Amendment) Act, which states that, any institution, irrelevant of being a government or private, can now apply to start new medical courses or increase seats.

"The increase in number of seats is because of the changed professor student ratio in the government medical colleges," said Dr. Desai.

The Health Ministry recently received the recommendations from the report submitted by MCI following which the ministry will issue a final order by March 31.