Ukraine crisis: Opposition pushes govt to ensure students complete courses

In the Rajya Sabha, chairman M Venkaiah Naidu said the government will make a statement on the situation in Ukraine and also the developments with regard to Indian students.

Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, while replying to a question raised by Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi, said the government will look into the measures that can be taken for the students who have been brought back from Ukraine under Operation Ganga, so that they can complete their education.

Terming the Operation Ganga Mission as a proof of the “collective wisdom of 130 crore Indians” Pradhan said in the Lok Sabha: “When we have brought them, you remain assured that government will ponder over making arrangements, whatsoever is required, to enable them to become doctors in future…At present, it is time for getting them out of the shock. We are all engaged in that.”

In the Zero Hour in the Lok Sabha, Congress MPs Abdul Khaleque and Kodikkunnil Suresh, and YSRCP’s M Sreenivasann Reddy asked the government to engage with private universities in the country to help the students. “They have to be accommodated in Indian medical colleges at a reasonable fee,” Reddy said.

Khaleque was of the view that the children should not be “burdened financially” to complete their courses.

Pointing out that the students “survived a war” and that the “abrupt halt in studies and uncertain future compounded by looming debt traps for families who took loans”, Suresh said their education loans must be waived off.

“The students who have faced emotional trauma must be provided with specialised care,” he said. “By sensing the shortcomings in coordination and evacuation mission, the government must appoint a student’s welfare wing in every embassy and consular office of India in foreign countries that will function round the clock, and a master control room to be set up in the External Affairs ministry headquarters as a policy intervention mechanism for any such eventuality.”

Several members raised the issue in Rajya Sabha too. TDP’s Kanakamedala Ravindra Kumar said the future of the students is at stake. “The war between Russia and Ukraine is not likely to come to an end in the near future. Therefore, I urge the government to take necessary steps after consulting with the stakeholders, including the NMC to absorb all the students,” he said.

Congress’s K C Venugopal agreed. He said: “What is going to be done to the students is a great concern in the country now. The education of those students has now come to a standstill. What is going to be done by it, the government has to clarify because they have to provide relief in that matter,” he said.

BJD’s Amar Patnaik said the government should increase the number of seats in all the private and Government medical colleges by two to five per cent. It should also “take care of the fifth year which has the clinical component in some ingenious method so that their education is not compromised.”

YSRCP’s V Vijayasai Reddy “when an ongoing medical college in India is shut down, we have a proper procedure through which students are appropriately dispersed into other medical schools in India. A special transfer procedure, along similar lines, can also be formulated for medical students returning from Ukraine on a temporary basis.”

Trinamool Congress’s Nadimul Haque said the Russia-Ukraine conflict has exposed the inefficiency plaguing the Indian medical education system in India. He said medical education in India is unaffordable and competitive which has forced aspirants from lower and middle income families to pursue medicine in countries where it is cheaper and less competitive.