This kind of an entrance examination will be in place from 2011 onwards.

The MCI’s decision has been accepted by the Union Health Ministry. Currently, students who wish to pursue a course in medicine need to appear for approximately five or six entrance examinations for different colleges that they are interested in attending. To compound matters there are usually issues like exam dates at different colleges clashing or coming in too close together for candidates who wish to appear for both, to be able to do so. Students also are highly inconvenienced due to the travel that is required to distant locations for counseling and allotment of seats.

The new MCI decision means that all of these hassles will be done away with. One entrance test for the MBBS course and one for the MD course will be held for all the 271 medical colleges in the country. Of these 138 colleges are run by the government and 133 are functioning under private management. Altogether a total of 31,000 seats are offered for the MBBS course, and for the post graduate course, there are a total of 11,000 seats.

The Maharashtra state government has been favourable to the MCI decision. The managements of the private colleges, however, say that the MCI decision is against the spirit of a Supreme Court judgment – that was ruled in the TMA Pai case. This ruling had recognised and safeguarded the freedom of private and unaided institutions on several issues, which include the right to admission. They say that educational institutions must be allowed to take their own decisions without any form of government control. The private colleges have a separate common entrance test that determines the right to admission in 11 medical and 21 dental colleges in Maharashtra.

The guidelines for the single entrance exam are yet to be finalised and it remains to be seen how much of the decision will go through following this much opposition from private establishments.

Rs 451 crore has been allocated by the government as non-recurring expenditure for setting up the new IIMs and Rs 118 crore has been allocated as recurring expenditure for the first phase.

The four cities are Trichurapally (Tiruchi / Trichy) in Tamil Nadu, Ranchi in Jharkand, Raipur in Chhattisgarh and Rohtak in Haryana. Initially, the new IIMs would all operate from temporary premises. Classes would begin in the academic year of 2010-11.

IIMs are also approved for the states of Rajasthan, Jammu and Kashmir and Rajasthan.

We have always found the debate over reservations for institutions like AIIMS, IIT and IIM ridiculous. There is such a high demand for high quality education institutions that the solution is to increase the size of the pie, not to divide the pie into even smaller pieces, leading to a mad scramble and raised tempers for a seat.

Admissions to the new IIMs would be through a common entrance test. In the initial phase, 140 students would be admitted, and that would be raised to 560 in the second phase.

Hopefully, the new IIMs would help students in more states to have access to the high quality education in IIMs.

The governments of Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand, Chhatisgarh and Haryana, where the new IIMs would be coming up in the first phase have already identified the land.

Media has reported that Chhattisgarh government has already identified 200 acres for the Raipur IIM campus, while the Haryana government has marked 170 acres for its Rohtak IIM campus.

For the IIM at Tiruchirapaly, the Tamil Nadu government has identified 192.35 acres  and 214 acres of land for the Raipur IIM in Jharkhand has also been finalised.