Face of Nation : Every time she flew back from home in Anand, Gujarat, 24-year-old Rashi Patel would carry in her checked-in luggage men who had a lot to say and weighed on an average 3 kg. This is how Deepak Marwah, A K Setiya, Gobind Rai Garg, B D Chaurasia and K Sembulingam came to live in northeastern China, on her bookshelf at the Tianjin Medical University’s (TMU) student dormitory.
Last winter, Patel scored 186 marks out of 300 in the Foreign Medical Graduate Exam (FMGE), a mandatory screening test conducted by the Medical Council of India (MCI) for students who obtain medical degrees from colleges outside India but are keen to practise medicine back home. The exam can be taken twice a year — June and December — starting from the student’s internship year. To clear the “extremely tough” FMGE, Patel “thoroughly read Indian notes” day and night. “I mostly read Deepak Marwah sir’s notes. They are very good,” she says.
For these Indians, whose dreams of donning the scrub are often stymied by fierce competition back home and the limited number of medical seats — 84,127 seats are on offer in a mere 573 colleges, government and private, in 2019-2020, according to the government’s recent response in Parliament — China is an attractive option, the country an emerging player in a market that has traditionally been dominated by Russia and other east European countries.
Patel is at the end of her China journey. So is her classmate Mrinalini K V S S, who is preoccupied with sending home four years of purchases made on Taobao, a Chinese online shopping website. “Mostly clothes,” she says, laughing.
Originally bound for Nanjing Medical University in the eastern Jiangsu province, Mrinalini enrolled in TMU “by mistake” in 2013. “My agent messed up,” she says. According to students The Sunday Express spoke to, the ‘agent’, a crucial conduit for this journey to China, can be anyone — a high school teacher, a friendly neighbourhood uncle, an NGO in rural Tamil Nadu, or seniors who graduated from medical schools in China but couldn’t clear the FMGE. In one case, it was the student’s uncle. This student even got a discount, but only on the commission he paid his agent-uncle.
On the face of it, a degree from China is an alluring option, says a former student who does not wish to be identified. “There are no criteria by which you get admitted to a course. If you have the money, you get admission,” he says, adding that this is reflected in the quality of students who end up in China.
Around 7,000-8,000 Indian students travel to China every year for an MBBS degree. Though some universities specify their requirements — the need to have passed high school with a certain minimum percentage — in many other instances, students say, there are no entry barriers.
Says Madhurima Nundy, Associate Fellow of the Delhi-based Institute of Chinese Studies, “China is a good option for those not qualifying the public medical college exams (in India). Studying in China is far cheaper than studying in private medical colleges in India. Besides, some of these (Chinese) universities are rated high by international standards when compared to Russian universities.”
Patel says her parents spent roughly Rs 30-40 lakh for her six years in China. A first-year student’s fee structure, shared by an agent, adds up to around Rs 22.5 lakh a year, which includes tuition fee, hostel, food, health insurance, residential permit, physical examination, textbooks and “experiment material”.
