Why IITs are in sickly need of MBBS courses

In 2008, as a new student eager to study in an IIT, I welcomed the sprawling vastness of the IIT Kharagpur campus, replete with brilliant yellow lighting, beautifully planned landscaping, state of the art internet (and later, WiFi connectivity) and all the modern facilities in a quaint, peri-urban setting in West Bengal. After having spent 19 years in cramped, suburban Bombay, this seemed like heaven.

With 20 hostels and numerous staff quarters,the campus is home to approximately 20,000 inhabitants every year. It has everything. Well, almost, except for a decent hospital.

Named BC Roy Technology Hospital, after a legendary physician and the second chief minister of West Bengal, this campus hospital is small, with 32 beds, an out-patient department (OPD) that serves 7,000 people every month, a tele-conferencing facility to consult with doctors in other hospitals, and ambulance connectivity with the nearby state and railway hospitals.

It might surprise you that it does not have an operation theatre, although one is under construction. And the hospital is not exclusive to on-campus students; it is also open, and rightly so, to all the nearby residents of the town.

This hospital was constructed in 1964 and, while it has undergone various repairs, it hasn't grown bigger. The number of students on the campus have increased manifold since the 1960s. New hostels have been built to accommodate them. But the medical infrastructure in the campus has maintained its humble size.

Towards the end of my first year, in 2009, an incident occurred on the campus.

The internet was blocked, for the fear of the media chasing the story. A close friend had reported it on his blog from outside the campus.

A student, in his third year, had been visiting the hospital for a few days with chronic headaches. He was always sent back with painkillers by the doctors at the OPD; they never once bothered to enquire further into his condition. On his way back from the hospital, he collapsed and hit his head. The hospital, not having a neurologist, redirected him to the nearest hospital in Kolkata, which was 120 kilometres away. Seeing that his condition was worsening by the minute, his friends decided to take him to the nearby hospital outside the campus. He died on the way there.

The death of this student wasn't a one-off incident; the hospital had a notoriously bad record. A few months before the incident, a final year student had been mistakenly treated for jaundice and typhoid as a result of which he suffered kidney failure. After the mistreatment, however, his parent shifted him to a plush hospital in Delhi where he finally recovered. Another student, around the same time, died of a cardiac arrest because the hospital was not able to find an oxygen mask. Many more incidents have happened due to medical negligence by the hospital.

A trip to the hospital was risky at best and fatal at worst. There was an unwritten rule amongst all of us: going to the hospital was not an option.

With the student's death, however, things reached a tipping point. The sentiment in the campus boiled and there was an uproar from the students. Stones were pelted at the director's windows. His car was overturned. The students mass-bunked classes and demanded an immediate resolution on the matter. They asked for a newer, better, and bigger hospital.

Back then, it made an impression on my freshman mind. But now when I look back at that incident in retrospection, the uproar seems fairly meek. After all, it took my alma-mater six years to fulfil her students' requests.

Nonetheless, I am pleasantly surprised to learn that, soon, IIT Kharagpur will start offering MBBS courses on its campus. For this purpose, the campus, which was until now dependent on a larger than usual Primary Health Centre (PHC), will get a big, swanky 400-bed super speciality hospital. The government has already sanctioned a grant of Rs 230 crore for this. If all goes well, the new hospital will be ready by 2017.

Many people in the country ask if it is justified that the IITs get so much money from the government. I think a more pertinent and constructive question is, are the IITs justified in handing out tuition fees to students, and running their hostels, classrooms and extra-curricular facilities beyond optimum capacity, when they should really be spending that money on providing, at the least, basic access to healthcare?

The shoddy state of medical infrastructure is common to the other IITs as well. Back in 2009, when the grim incident occurred, the local newspaper of the campus, The Scholars' Avenue, reviewed medical facilities in all the IITs in one of their issues. The IITs in cities were better off, but the ones in smaller towns were in the danger zone.

What is the benefit of funding someone's education when, by humbly accepting the taxpayer's money, the student is obliviously taking on the seemingly unrelated risk of death? It's a sad rhetoric that admission to the IITs is a high risk, high return game. What is perhaps sadder is the fact that IITs are the elitists of the lot. I am fairly certain that the other universities in the country are in a graver state.

The engineers-in-making can probably do without subsidised education. But I think what they really need are a few doctor friends.