India’s ‘doctor shortage’ narrative overshadows the neglect of public health
· Scroll
In 2025, while researching the recent rapid increase in the number of medical colleges in India, I discovered that this aspect of the country’s medical education policy was based, shockingly, on a non-existent World Health Organization recommendation: the “ideal” 1:1,000 doctor-to-population ratio.
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Despite there being no such “WHO norm,” Indian policymakers have been employing it in decision-making for more than a decade. Even after substantially raising the numbers of medical colleges and doctors on the basis of that imaginary norm, many policymakers and experts continue to assert that India suffers from a shortage of biomedical or “allopathic” doctors. This “permanent shortage” stance seems like a manifestation of policy amnesia; not too long ago, there was a general consensus in the country’s public health discourse that India had an adequate number of doctors.
Indeed the arc stretching from the claim by AIIMS experts in 2000 that the doctor-population ratio had “already exceeded that required by the country,” to the comment in a 2005 government report that the aggregate of doctors in India was “not very low,” to confident assertions by 2012 that India had an “abysmally low” doctor-population ratio, constitutes an extraordinary U-turn in policy discourse.
With health indicators in India still worse than global averages, and health inequalities among the worst in the world, any assertion...