#159 Three Conundrums

PolicyWTF: Band-aids for Bullet Wounds<br/><br/>This section looks at egregious public policies. Policies that make you go: WTF, Did that really happen?<br/><br/>&#160;-&#160;Pranay Kotasthane<br/><br/>The ongoing political crisis in Ukraine has a small sub-plot that links to India&#8217;s education policy self-goals. Before the current crisis unfolded, I had heard that Russia and Ukraine were popular destinations for aspiring medical students from India. What I didn&#8217;t know was how big this cohort is in Ukraine. Multiple news reports claim that there are nearly 18,000 of them in Ukraine alone. Apparently, Indian medical students are also opting to study in Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Kyrgyzstan besides Russia and Ukraine. <br/><br/>Of course, these students are merely responding to incentives. Commonly understood reasons for students taking up courses outside India are the limited number of seats in government medical colleges, and higher costs in private medical colleges. Ask anyone about MBBS education in India, and they will launch into a tirade about how the &#8220;commercialisation&#8221; of medical education has turned it unaffordable.<br/><br/>But as readers of this newsletter would know, price is just a signal of the underlying market conditions. And so, fixing prices cannot be done by price-fixing. In this particular case, higher prices are due to the low supply of undergraduate medical seats. Apparently, <a href="https://medicaldialogues.in/pdf_upload/lok-sabha-2-165838.pdf">88,120 seats are on offer every year</a>. For reference, there were 2,86,000 undergraduate seats in China. A good 40 per cent of these seats are in government colleges where the fee is subsidised by the taxes Indian citizens pay, while the remaining 60 per cent are in private colleges where the fee can <a href="https://m.economictimes.com/industry/services/education/the-money-one-needs-to-shell-out-to-become-a-doctor-in-india/articleshow/87389789.cms">range</a> from &#8377;18 lakhs to &#8377;30 lakhs a year. The demand ou