New Delhi, Sept. 17: Medical graduates who practise in India’s rural areas will receive extra marks in the national entrance test for postgraduate medical studies under a novel plan to entice doctors to villages, the government announced today.

The health ministry said each year of rural service would give a medical graduate aspiring to pursue postgraduate medical courses 10 per cent extra marks in the entrance examination — up to a maximum of 30 per cent after three years’ rural service.

The graduate doctors would have to make themselves available for rural services after they complete their internship periods.

Graduates who complete internships in 2010 are likely to be the first batch of doctors who can take up the rural service for extra marks, a senior health official said. About 33,000 students graduate as doctors each year, but the number of postgraduate seats is only about 13,000.

“We want to encourage doctors to go to rural areas before they apply for the entrance examination,” Union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said, announcing recent initiatives in medical education and rural health.

The national postgraduate entrance test is used to fill up half — about 6,500 seats — of the total capacity of postgraduate medical courses across the country. The rest of the seats are filled mostly through state-level exams.

The plan caps a decade-long debate on ways to lure doctors into rural areas. Health officials had discussed the possibility of making a year of rural service mandatory for entrance to postgraduate medicine, but that idea has been abandoned.

However, a senior doctor associated with postgraduate medical education in India said the mechanism through which medical graduates would be able to deliver rural service was still unclear. “Will they be accommodated in the government’s primary health centres or can they work in private rural clinics — in such cases how will the government verify whether rural service has indeed been rendered?” asked the doctor.

The government appears to have ignored time-tested and proven models of rural service that exist in some states. In Tamil Nadu, for instance, 50 per cent of postgraduate medical seats are reserved for government doctors who have served in rural areas.

Azad said the ministry had also relaxed the land requirements for the establishment of new medical colleges across India.

It has also the changed rules to increase postgraduate medical seats — after consultation with the Medical Council of India.

The land required for medical colleges across India will now be 20 acres instead of 25 acres. In metropolitan cities, the requirement will be only 10 acres. The government will allow public-private partnership projects to upgrade district hospitals to medical colleges in northeastern states, hilly regions and in states where the number of colleges is still less than one per 5 million people.

“We need more medical colleges and we need more specialists,” Azad said.

In a bid to bolster the postgraduate capacity, Azad said, the ministry will increase the number of postgraduate students from 13,000 to 18,000 by allowing eligible faculty in postgraduate institutions to accept two students instead of one.

He said new educational institutions will increase the number of nurses by 22,000 and the number of paramedical staff by 15,000 each year.