Can private participating alleviate the concerns?

To meet the significant shortfall of qualified doctors in northern States, scaling up of medical education is warranted.
However, the NITI Aayog’s proposal of allowing private entities to take over district hospitals for converting them into teaching hospitals with at least 150 MBBS seats, may sound attractive but there are reasons to be deeply concerned.
Through the implementation of such a policy, the private sector in medical education will be encouraged.
It will also directly aid the corporatisation processes of healthcare provisioning while the under-resourced public health system will be a collateral damage.
District hospitals are considered as the last resort for the poor.
The corporatisation will make the services very costly and exclude them from getting care.
Even from the perspective of producing more doctors to meet the shortages in under-served areas, this is unlikely to yield the desired result.
Private players treat medical education as a business.
Additionally, the medical graduates trained in such private sector ‘managed’ medical colleges will prefer to find employment in corporate hospitals and not in rural areas to regain their investment.
Further, this proposal is not aligned with India’s national health policy goals like achieving universal health care and health equity.
Instead, it will widen health inequalities further.