D for doctor, D also for dowry?

MRIDULA CHUNDURI / TNN / Jun 24, 2006, 08:45 IST

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The number of medicine aspirants are growing despite it takes longer for doctors to settle down in life than engineers.

HYDERABAD: Eighteen-year-old Ramya Sreeram is worried. She wants to become a doctor. There are some 70,000 others with the same dream, and just 4,025 MBBS seats in the state.
Ramya has a 17 to 1 chance. She could beat the odds if only she could shell out Rs 40 lakh for a management quota seat. If only Daddy were that rich.
For some of her friends who chose to do engineering, the choices were not so tough.There are one lakh candidates for 85,000 engineering seats—a much better ratio.
If they wanted to buy a management quota seat in a top college, it would cost them no more than Rs 10 lakh. There are 256 engineering colleges in the state but only 31 medical colleges.

Therefore, the demand for medical studies continues to grow. This year, the number of people who wrote Eamcet for MBBS increased from 70,000 to 92,000. The number of aspirants for engineering increased from 1.04 lakh last year to 1.42 lakh this year.
"While the number of engineering college seats has grown in proportion to the demand, there has been only a marginal increase in the number of MBBS seats.
Hence there is no supply for the demand. It is no wonder that capitation fees have shot up so much," said B Srinivas, a career consultant. Why are there so many medicine aspirants considering that it takes much longer for doctors to settle down in life than engineers?

An engineer is likely to find employment by the end of his fourth year of B.Tech. with a starting salary of at least Rs 18,000 per month. Even if he studies in an average college he would get a salary of Rs 10,000 per month.
Life's not so easy for doctors. After four and a half years of MBBS, they do one year's internship. Gone are the days when this was enough to start practising. If they do, they would earn just about Rs 8,000 per month.
Now everyone needs to specialise if they want to earn decent money. One has to put in two years into a post-graduate diploma or three years for an MD.

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