Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao announced on Tuesday, 15 March, that the state government would fund the education of 740 students from Telangana who had gone to pursue medicine in Ukraine.
Rao made the announcement in the state's Legislative Assembly during a debate on the Appropriation Bill. "We will write to the Centre to say we will support them," he said.
Rao also stated that the reason students had to go abroad to study was because they could not afford to pursue medicine in India.
"To study MBBS in India, it was costing them over Rs 1 crore and since they could not afford this they went to Ukraine where they had to pay Rs 20-25 lakh," he was quoted as saying by news agency IANS.
Rao's announcement comes after a massive debate regarding reasons behind Indian students going abroad to pursue medicine and other subjects. At least two students of Indian origin have died in the ongoing war in Ukraine so far.
The father of deceased student Naveen Gyanagoudar, who was killed during Russian shelling in Kharkiv, had said that he had sent his son abroad as medical education in India is very costly: "If professional education was affordable for the poor in this country, why would I have sent my son to Ukraine and lost him today?”
Union Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Pralhad Joshi had said in February this year that 90 percent of Indians who study medicine abroad fail to clear qualifying exams in India.
A number of people had condemned Joshi's statement, arguing that students went abroad to study because the cost of pursuing medicine in India was extremely high.
(With inputs from IANS.)
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