‘Study medicine without practicals’: Tough road for Indians enrolled in China as visa ban stays

In light of Covid, China banned visas for international students, affecting 23,000 Indian students studying there before the pandemic. Medical students form bulk of this.

Kirti Pathak (extreme right), a medical student at a Chinese university, with classmates in 2019 | By special arrangement

KRITIKA SHARMA, The Print, 11 February, 2022, New Delhi: Sonali Bhoyar, a 23-year-old medical student, had barely spent two years at a college in China when the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world. Along with 30 other Indian classmates, Bhoyar — a student at Hubei University of Science and Technology in Xianning — had to leave her hostel and her college overnight in February 2020 and come back to India. Her family lives in Nagpur, Maharashtra.

Since then studies have meant online classes for her.

In light of the Covid outbreak, China banned visas for international students, affecting an estimated 23,000 Indian students who had been studying in universities across the country before the pandemic started. Medical students form the bulk of this number.

The students’ return to India had also brought home the country’s first Covid case — a medical student from Kerala, who had been studying at a university in Wuhan.

Virtual classes since 2020 have meant that these students have had no practical experience, something considered indispensable in medical education.

Speaking to ThePrint, Bhoyar, who is currently in the fourth year of her five-year MBBS course, said, “Most of the practicals begin from third year onwards and I have had no practical experience. Studying online is also not easy… sometimes there is a network problem, sometimes I am unable to understand the concepts in the online class and if I ask something during the class, the doubt gets resolved the next day.”

One of Bhoyar’s classmates, also a Nagpur resident, who did not wish to be named, spoke about missing out on the campus experience in general.

“When I got admission in MBBS, I had certain expectations of how my life would be, but everything has changed so drastically for us. When we left China in 2020, I had no idea that we were not going back for a long time…I am in my fourth year right now, who knows whether I will be able to go back before I reach my final year,” she said.

While the China government said earlier this week that it is making a “coordinated attempt for the return of foreign students”, it did not specify when the students are likely to get back in the country.

According to diplomatic sources, the Indian government has also been pushing China to allow students to resume their studies in person. India’s medical regulator National Medical Council (NMC), meanwhile, has cautioned students in the country against seeking admission in Chinese institutions amid the visa ban.

But for the medical students already enrolled in universities there, two years of online classes have raised serious challenges with regard to their career.

(https://theprint.in/india/education/study-medicine-without-practicals-tough-road-for-indians-enrolled-in-china-as-visa-ban-stays/827190/)