IMA Asks PM Modi To Accept Ukraine-Returned Medical Students In Indian Colleges As 'One Time Exception'

The recommendation was made in an analogy in the context of what can happen if a medical college in India gets closed. 

Indian students returning from Ukraine | Getty Images

New Delhi: The Indian Medical Association has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressing their concerns for the medical students evacuated from crisis-hit Ukraine. In a letter to the PM on Friday, the IMA requested to induct these students to medical colleges in India, news agency PTI reported.

The IMA requested these students to be permitted to go to Indian medical colleges for the remainder of their MBBS course through “appropriate disbursed distribution”, however, that should not be taken as an annual increase in student intake.

The recommendation was made in an analogy in the context of what can happen if a medical college in India gets closed. 

“The analogy of the aforesaid proposition is drawn on the basis of explicit modality which is availed in the Indian context in case of closure of an ongoing medical college in India whereby the students already admitted thereat they are appropriately disbursed into other medical schools in India in terms of a structured procedure which is prescribed and the same is taken as a onetime exception not to be quoted as a precedence and construed as an augmentation or increase in the annual intake capacity of the add on admitting medical college in any manner," the letter said.

The letter further said that the students would require validation of certificates from relevant authorities so that the progression of students from Ukraine is permissible in Indian medical colleges.

“Resultantly, on passing out they will be as good as Indian medical graduates and not foreign medical graduates,” the letter said.

The letter expressed the concern of the medical fraternity for the students who were caught in between the conflict of two countries.

“Waiting for the things to take an appropriate shape and thereby keeping the fate of all these medical students in limbo cannot be taken as a worthwhile exercise,” the letter stated.