Is AIIMS Subsidizing American Healthcare?
By Sanu George Thiruvananthapuram With too many of its former students working in the US, the premier All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi is in some ways subsidizing American healthcare, says a public health expert here. Speaking to IANS, C.R. Soman, who runs the medical NGO Health Action by People, said he was shocked by a recent report that appeared in the latest issue of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization. Of the 428 students of AIIMS who studied between 1989 and 2000 and were included in the study, 233 (54 percent) resided abroad, the report said. What’s more, there was hardly any gender difference in the migration rate. The migration rate of scheduled caste and scheduled tribe students was at 29 percent, said Soman after analyzing the article written by Manas Kaushik and other colleagues titled “High-end physician migration from India”. Soman said admission to AIIMS came with a virtual guarantee that 54 percent of the successful candidates would
