New Delhi: After those huge figures of faculty crunch in schools and colleges, now it is the turn of the health ministry to wake up and decide to fill nearly 3.5 lakh vacancies for nurses in the country.

India has abysmally shameful ratio of one nurse for every 1,100 people, due to which the ministry has decided to raise the bar of eligibility by including married women into the nursing courses in the country.

With a letter issued to all the states directing them to allow married women to take admission in nursing colleges, Nursing Council director T Dileep Kumar hopes to address the crunch.

With 2,000 nursing diploma schools, 1,200 nursing degree schools and 281 M.Sc nursing colleges in the country, the annual production of nurses is around 60,000, "But the majority prefers private sector than public due to which we are facing a gap of 3.5 lakh nurses," Kumar said.

The officials point out the basic reason for the acute shortage to the migration of large number of qualified nurses to countries like Europe for better remuneration.

According to an official, "India will require 10.43 lakh nurses by the end of the 11th plan (2007-2012). But keeping in mind the existing infrastructure, the figure stands at just 6.84 lakh, falling short by 3.59 lakh nurses."

Talking about India's capacity, it has the ability to train 79,850 diploma nurses, 41,650 graduate nurses and 1,940 postgraduate nurses per year but the numbers collapse as over 20% of this number every year head to foreign shores.

"There has to be one nurse for every 500 persons," said an official.

The retirement age of the faculty in nursing colleges has now been increased by the ministry to 70 years.

At a meeting of the consultative committee of Parliament on health, held on Wednesday, the qualification and experience of nursing teachers was relaxed up to 2012.

Five percent advantage has been given to the eligibility criteria of admission for diploma and degree courses.

The M.Sc programme's teacher student ratio has seen a relaxation from 1:5 earlier to 1:10 now.

Other measures taken during the meeting include sharing of teaching faculty for both diploma and graduate programme, establishment of centres of excellence at the state level at a cost of Rs.20 crore per institution and opening of 269 nursing schools in high focus states.

Strengthening of 14 nursing councils and establishing six nursing colleges while associating them with new All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) like institutions at Rs.20 crore per college was also decided by the ministry.

The developed countries have the nurse-doctor ratio to be 3:1 while that in India it stands at 1.5:1.

According to the ministry's estimates, India will require 10.4 lakh nurses. Out of the total registered nurses (9.3 lakh) so far only 40% of them, that is, 3.7 lakh are expected to be active.

The total number of active nurses by 2012 in India is expected to be 6.85 lakh.