I'm not sure yet where this post will go but I think the title stems from shantanu's rather verbose comment on my previous post. But like he said I've known him long enough to not need to prove to him or myself how much of a nut he can be. And I'm still not sure if the comment following his is for the post or for the comment. All that aside, here I am with about four hours of sleep that resulted from reaffirming why TGIF in happy hours can be one of the happiest places to be in, nursing a complaining head with a cup of coffee. The phone's been buzzing most of the night with calls for a nationwide strike of all medical services emergency or otherwise and an appeal to not treat a policeman if the such a situation arises (a little antithesis there but still). Have tried to stay out of the whole reservation discussion but at some point of time images of the brethren (and sistren) being beaten up by the servers and protectors are, to say the least, disconcerting.
On an aside recently learnt that the cops are taught how to lathi the occasional socially disruptive element - they have to turn him/her around and hit on the back/butt firmly but not with the strength or intent to cripple/maim. So if the lathi charge on the medicos comes up for enquiry it will be bad for the cops who've been caught on camera whacking the poor sods wherever they could.
But why are only the docs screaming... Interestingly Thorsten Wiesel (1981 Nobel Prize winner for medicine for some incredible work on the visual pathway) was/is in town and apparently was wondering why the hue and cry on 'affirmative action' was restricted to medicine. The numbers here are far more frightening than they are in engineering. There are too many engineering colleges around, that we have to agree and despite the numbers of graduates coming out, there are enough jobs in the industry to absorb them. It is also relatively inexpensive to increase the number of seats to cushion any reservation policy that the short-sighted, vote-bank politicking government might come up with.
Post graduation in medicine is close to one of the most difficult things to achieve nowadays. It's not half as difficult as getting into an iit or an iim but the ratios involved make it next to impossible, at least in a government college. Of course if you have about 30 lakhs to shell out as down payment or building fees and about 5-6 lakhs a year after that, there are private colleges but that kind of money is hard to come by... So what have we in terms of seats - approximately 30-40 in AIIMS, PGI, JIPMER, 2000 in the All-India entrance and by some extrapolation about another 4000 seats in state medical colleges. a grand total of 6500, give or take. number of medical graduates coming out every year? easily around 30,000. do the math - excluding the ones that go abroad (they can't get to the UK anymore, that's a different story), get married, do MBAs or medical transcription and the ones that get post grad, there's a pool of about 15,000 doctors ADDED to the ones that write the entrance exams.
And the government wants to halve the number of seats available on the general merit list.
And it wants the section of society most affected by it to sit around quietly on their lathi-charged behinds.
This of course Dr. Weisel digested with some good wine, shook his intelligent head and left for the US.
But this policy is one that if implemented could lead to civil war. Some bunch of guys inspired by the recent well-criticised movie might just take a gun to the government. Then there'll be hell to pay. Or better yet the HRD ministry should interact with the BCCI and insist on reservation in the cricket team, so the country's current pride and joy represents the demographics better.
But as of now... what else is to be done outside of getting to the hospital, treating the dying, the sick, the less sick and the malingerers... cops included and hoping that the 10 or 12 seats for superspecialisation (which is incidentally called subspecialisation in the west) that have been spared by the supreme court from Mandal's far-sighted directives, stay that way.
