The Union health ministry on Monday decided to send additional secretary Arun Panda to discuss issues with the protesting students of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Patna on Tuesday.

The students had last Saturday spoken to Jagdish Prasad, director-general of health services at the ministry, who had assured them that he would to come over to the campus to interact with them October 6.

Sources in AIIMS-Patna said pressure was mounting on the ministry because the students were not in a mood to end their protest and they were also getting support from their counterparts at AIIMS-Bhopal and institutions like the National Institute of Technology-Srinagar. Joint secretary at the Union health the ministry, Sunil Sharma, sent a letter to the protesting students on Monday in which he confirmed about Panda's visit to the campus, sources said.

"We are happy that the ministry has realised the emergency of the situation but we would be more happy if something positive comes out of the meeting tomorrow (Tuesday)," said an MBBS student who did not want to be identified. "We know work related to the construction of hospital blocks and faculty recruitment cannot be achieved in a short period but until and unless we take an initiative, things will not change. The ministry should tell us about the measures proposed to address our concerns."

On September 27, for the first time ever since the institution became operational in 2012, the MBBS students took to the protest path for lack of infrastructure and manpower deficiencies at the college and its attached hostel.

Among the major deficiencies the students have pointed out are the lack of teachers at the college, delay in setting up the trauma and emergency wing, and the lack of clinical teaching space.

The students had organised a procession on the college campus on September 27 and had started boycotting classes from the day after. Earlier, students had also walked out of the AIIMS fourth foundation day celebrations.

AIIMS-Patna director G.K. Singh said students had given him a list of 41 demands on Sunday. "We have responded to them about the action being taken on their issues," he said.

The Telegraph has a copy each of the list of demands the students submitted to Singh, and his reply to the students.

Students had raised the issue of inappropriate clinical teaching space in the hospital and had also requested reduction in strength of student batches taking part in clinical teaching together. They had pointed out that there had been many instances when three batches comprising 90 students were slotted for clinical teaching in a single department.

The Telegraph had also highlighted the issues in the article headlined "Hospital Horror Stories: AIIMS Students Outline Crisis" elaborating how a group of 30 students had together witnessed a delivery as part of clinical teaching, while in an earlier instance 90 students had together taken part in clinical teaching at the medicine department around a month ago.

Students also raised the issue of insufficient cadavers in the anatomy department. Dissecting a cadaver is considered an essential part of medical training; it helps students understand how the body works.

Since AIIMS-Patna's inception, students have faced cadaver shortage in their practical classes, which makes them dependent on a special software (Acland's anatomy) to understand the human anatomy. According AIIMS sources, each batch of 100 students are forced to work with one or two cadavers in their anatomy classes.

The AIIMS administration, in the letter to students, responded that adequate number of autopsies had been demonstrated to each batch at Patna Medical College. Moreover, practical method is recorded in their practical note book, which was checked during the examination.

The administration attributed difficulty in meeting specifications prepared by the departments to the delay in setting up well-equipped laboratories. It claimed that single bids were received most of the time. The administration had asked the heads of departments to organise a meeting on the issue.