A WHO study titled ‘The Health Workforce in India’, published in June 2016, revealed that the density of all doctors — allopathic, ayurvedic, homoeopathic and unani — at the national level was 80 doctors per lakh population compared to 130 in China.
Ignoring those who don’t have a medical qualification, the number for India fell to 36 doctors per lakh population. As for nurses and midwives, India had 61 workers per lakh population compared to 96 in China. The number reduced tenfold to 6 per lakh population, if only those with a medical qualification were considered.
Health workers
The study found substantial variation in the density of health workers across States and districts. For instance, Kerala had 38.4 per cent of the country’s medically qualified nurses but constituted only 3.1 per cent of the total population. Similarly, West Bengal had 30.6 per cent of all homoeopathic doctors in the country but only 7.8% of the population. Better-off States seemed to afford more doctors plus nurses per capita, the study noted.
District-wise, the inequalities were massive. The density of allopathic doctors with any level of education in the lowest 30 districts — half of which were in north-eastern States and the other in central States — was a little over 9.4 per lakh of the population whereas, in the highest 30 districts, it was 159 per lakh of population, it said.
In the case of dentists, the situation was even worse. The national density of dentists was extremely low at 2.4 per lakh population, with 58 (of the total 593) districts having no dentists at all in 2001. In fact, 175 districts (30 per cent) had no dentists with a medical qualification.
“The proposed study would provide an extremely valuable benchmark even if only for 2001,” Montek Singh Ahluwalia, former Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission (now NITI Aayog) noted in the preface to the report. While presenting this study to the then PM Manmohan Singh, he mentioned that all doctors did not need to have an MBBS degree.
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