There aren’t any nursing faculties in 40% of districts throughout India, based on Health Ministry information accessed by The Hindu. In truth, 42% of nursing establishments are clustered in 5 southern States, whereas three western States have 17%.

The Centre has tried to right such regional disparity with a scheme to ascertain 157 new nursing faculties co-located with medical faculties by April 2025, in addition to offering brief time period coaching for nurses. However, it says that numerous States have did not utilise such schemes correctly.

Nursing companies type the spine of any medical institution. India at present has near 35 lakh nurses, however its nurse-to-population ratio is just 2.06:1000 towards a world benchmark of three:1000.

Regional skew

Although there was a 36% development within the variety of establishments providing undergraduate nursing schooling since 2014-15, leading to a 40% development in nursing seats, there’s a regional skew inside these statistics. About 64% of the nursing workforce is at present educated in simply eight States; 42% of nursing establishments are concentrated in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana, whereas 17% are within the western states of Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra. Only 2% of nursing faculties are within the northeastern states.

The development of nursing faculties additionally lags far behind the 81% development charge of medical faculties, with the variety of undergraduate and postgraduate medical seats surging at 110% and 114% respectively, since 2014-15.

Global nursing shortages

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), roughly 27 million women and men make up the worldwide nursing and midwifery workforce, accounting for practically 50% of the worldwide well being workforce. “There is a world scarcity of well being staff, particularly nurses and midwives, who characterize greater than 50% of the present scarcity in well being staff. The largest needs-based shortages of nurses and midwives are in Southeast Asia and Africa,’’ based on a WHO report.

“Nurses play a important function in well being promotion, illness prevention and delivering main and neighborhood care. They present care in emergency settings and shall be key to the achievement of common well being protection. They are sometimes the primary to detect well being emergencies and work on the entrance strains of illness prevention and the supply of main well being care, together with promotion, prevention, remedy, and rehabilitation,’‘ WHO said.

Central schemes

To counter regional disparity, the Central government has announced a scheme to set up 157 new nursing colleges co-located with medical colleges in the next two years, with financial support of ₹10 crore per college. “To expedite this scheme, States would be required to send their proposals for establishing their nursing colleges and to constitute a state level monitoring committee to monitor the progress of the project for timely completion,’’ the Centre has suggested, based on a Health Ministry report.

It has additionally expressed its concern concerning the poor uptake of its Development of Nursing Services scheme in some States. Short time period trainings for nurses have been carried out below this scheme, with 18,600 nurses benefitting from 620 programs. The Centre famous that States similar to Delhi, Kerala, Manipur, and Mizoram have benefitted from this coaching scheme, however Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, and Telangana have under-utilised this scheme.