India today is the frontier of medicine. The stature of India’s Healthcare system is for everyone to see. Moreover whatever has been achieved has been achieved in shoestring budgets of several decades. A steel network of public Health institutions with primary care focus and outreach capabilities, 600 medical colleges, 600 plus district hospitals, hundreds of thousands of Family physicians and specialists, a strong chain of secondary care hospitals and nursing homes, national centers of excellence like AIIMS and an ubiquitous private tertiary care give the complete picture of Health care available to our people. India’s Health system is well structured and balanced.

The weaknesses of the lopsided Health Systems of several countries are being exposed. The only Health system that takes care of the needs of the poor and marginalized and people without any insurance, functions in India. We have one million plus fully qualified modern medicine doctors with adequately represented specialties and super specialties. No other country is better endowed than India. The medical education of India has withstood tests of time and has produced the finest doctors in the world. As a matter of fact Indian doctors Mann the major Health systems of the world.

A senior official of Niti Aayog has indicated that professionalization of Medical Education is expensive and cost cutting was in order. According to Time of India he was participating in Bennett University’s global online conference on COVID 19 fall out and future. He said “We need to reduce the cost of medical education quite dramatically. We must not over professionalize the system. We don’t always need a qualified MBBS to give us an anesthesia or read scans. We can have a whole set of technically qualified yet not-so-expensive experts”. When people are losing lives in COVID 19 pandemic, this suggestion of cost cutting appears odd. This suggestion has come when the Honorable Prime Minister has said that every Indian life is important. The suggestion is to hand over sophisticated disciplines like anesthesia and imageology to non-medical technicians.