Cost of medical education doubled in India in last decade: Study

India’s cost per doctor doubled, from $35,000 to $70,000, while China’s nearly tripled from $14,000 to $41,000 between 2008 and 2018. 

The average cost of producing a doctor or nurse doubled in India and tripled in China, whereas it went down in most parts of the world between 2008 and 2018, shows a Lancet study. 

Despite this, the estimated expenditure per medical graduate in China at $41,000 is higher only than in sub-Saharan Africa and about 42 per cent lower than in India ($70,000) against a global average of $114,000.

North Africa only region where expenses rose 

The only other region where the cost per graduate went up was North Africa, with doctors at 47 per cent and nurses 25 per cent. The pattern was the same for nurses with the estimated expenditure per nursing graduate dropping across the world while it went up by 167 per cent in China and doubled in India.  

Mean costs in 2018 were $114,000 per doctor and $32,000 per nurse. In 2008, China had the lowest estimated expenditure per medical graduate at just $14,000 (INR 6 lakh) followed by India, where it was just $35,000 (INR 15 lakh at the 2008 exchange rate of INR 43 to a dollar). This is much lower than the estimate of INR 1 crore or more that Indian colleges widely claim as expenditure per medical graduate. Mean costs in 2018 were $114,000 per doctor and $32,000 per nurse. The study estimated approximately $110 billion was invested globally by governments and students' families in medical and nursing education in 2018. Of this, $60.9 billion was invested in doctors and $48.8 billion was invested in nurses and midwives.  

Europe saw a dramatic reduction in the average costing expenditure, which halved across all European regions between 2008 and 2018. It fell by almost 42 per cent in Latin America too. Per capita expenditures for training doctors and nurses were 10 times more in North America than in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

The yearly number of medical and nursing graduates had almost doubled for doctors and tripled for nurses and midwives over the 10-year period. This is much higher than the global population growth of just 8 per cent, thus nearly doubling doctor-population ratios. Nurses, unsurprisingly, are the majority of health professionals more than all other professional groups combined, the study noted. 

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