2 of 3 ‘doctors’ in rural India have no formal medical degrees: Study

Although 75% of villages have at least one health care provider and a village on average has three primary health providers, 86% of them are private “doctors” and 68% have no formal medical training, found a survey.

The study supports the World Health Organization’s 2016 report on ‘The Health Workforce in India’, which had also found that 57.3% people practising allopathic medicine in India did not have a medical qualification, and 31.4% were educated only up to secondary school level.

At least two of every three “doctors” in rural India are informal providers of care, with no qualifications in modern system of medicine, according to India’s first comprehensive assessment of public and private health care availability and quality, as measured by their medical knowledge.