Three IITs are entering medicine. The doctors they want do not exist yet

Somewhere in India today, a woman will walk into a primary health centre with the exhaustion that signals severe anaemia, and leave without knowing it. Not because the science is missing. A haemoglobin test is among the oldest, simplest diagnostics medicine has. She will leave undiagnosed because the machine is absent, or broken, or has no reagent, or nobody present knows how to run it.That gap, between what Indian science can do and what actually reaches an Indian patient, is the reason three of the country's most prestigious engineering institutes are now building medical schools. IIT Kanpur, IIT Kharagpur and IIT Madras are each moving into medicine at once, by three quite different routes, and none of them is doing it because India needs more doctors.WHAT EXACTLY IS EACH IIT BUILDING?They are not copying one another, and the differences matter.IIT Kanpur is building upward before outward. Professor Anil K. Lalwani, dean of its Gangwal School of Medical Sciences and Technology, told India Today Digital the institute will launch higher and super-speciality medical degrees first, the MD, DM and MCh qualifications that turn a general physician into a cardiologist or a neurosurgeon, alongside transdisciplinary research programmes. The MBBS, the degree most Indians associate with becoming a doctor, sits three to four years further down that road. The infrastructure is already dated. The 500-bed Yadupati Singhania Super-speciality Hospital will be inaugurated by the end of this year and receive its first patient by March 2027, Lalwani said, with a 50-bed Cancer Care and Research Centre beside it. The institute has secured initial approval for 60 new faculty members, its largest expansion of the kind.IIT Kharagpur started earliest. Its School of Medical Science and Technology dates to 2001, and its MMST programme was built specifically to teach engineering and physical sciences to people who were already doctors. It has since built a hospital and secured approval for postgraduate medical courses. IIT Madras has been the most explicit about the full sweep. In an exclusive interview on campus, Director Professor V. Kamakoti told India Today Digital the institute would open a school of medical sciences awarding the undergraduate MBBS, the postgraduate MD and the doctoral PhD. "Any technology institution must start a medical school," he said. "Otherwise, as a country, we cannot survive the medical market." IIT Madras Director V. Kamakoti says the institute will offer MBBS, MD and PhD degrees at a new school of medical sciences. (Photo: Radifah Kabir/India Today) None of the three has graduated a doctor yet. All three are building towards it.WHY WOULD ENGINEERS WANT TO TRAIN DOCTORS?The honest answer is that they do not, particularly, want more doctors. What all three are chasing is a different specialist, the physician-engineer.Professor Suman Chakraborty, Director of IIT Kharagpur, argues the separation of the two professions has simply stopped working. "Thirty years ago, much of medicine could still be practised with technology functioning largely as an external support system," he told India Today Digital. "Today, technology is increasingly embedded within the act of diagnosis, prediction, intervention and follow-up itself."A doctor now works amid medical imaging, AI decision systems, molecular diagnostics, biosensors, robotics and wearable devices. An engineer building any of those can no longer treat the patient as a distant end-user. "The old model, medicine identifies a problem and engineering subsequently supplies a machine, is becoming inadequate," Professor Chakraborty said. IIT Kanpur, where the Gangwal School of Medical Sciences and Technology is building a teaching hospital expected to take its first patients from 2027. Professor Lalwani is, in a sense, the living proof of the alternative. For nearly three decades at Columbia University he held two titles at once, professor of otolaryngology and professor of mechanical engineering, an arrangement most institutions would never permit under one roof.His own research sits exactly where the two meet: gene therapy for hearing loss alongside microneedle devices for delivering drugs into the inner ear.India has now asked him to turn one man's unusual career into an institutional pipeline.WHAT ACTUALLY GOES WRONG WHEN DOCTORS AND ENGINEERS COLLABORATE?Professor Chakraborty offers the sharpest illustration of why simply putting the professions in a room does not fix this."A doctor may say, I need this test to be more sensitive," Professor Chakraborty said. "An engineer may optimise analytical sensitivity by another decimal point. But the real clinical requirement may instead be a Rs 100 test that gives a sufficiently reliable answer in ten minutes, requires no cold chain, survives transportation, can be operated by a frontline worker and immediately tells her whether the patient needs referral."Two competent professionals, optimising the wrong variable. "The advantage of the hybrid mind is not that it replaces two specialists," he said. "It is that it recognises the right problem before either discipline begins optimising the wrong one."IS THIS JUST BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING RENAMED?It is the obvious scepticism, and Professor Chakraborty meets it directly. The difference cannot live in a course title, he argues, it has to live in what a student is required to do.His preferred model is a longitudinal project he calls Clinical Problem-to-Product Translation, where a student identifies a real unmet clinical need, understands the physiology, builds or evaluates a solution, navigates validation and regulation, works out whether it can be manufactured affordably, and tests it in a real community setting."Bedside, problem definition, laboratory, prototype, evidence, bedside and community," he said. "That is fundamentally different from studying biomedical engineering as an elective subject."At Kanpur, that philosophy is already taking physical form. While the degrees are still being planned, the school is building the machines its future doctors might carry, including a fully indigenous LVAD (Left Ventricular Assist Device), a heart-failure pump, now in animal trials, and portable ultrasound devices designed to detect pneumonia, a leading killer of newborns, in rural India.HOW DOES THIS WORK WITHIN MEDICAL REGULATION?Medical education in India is governed by the National Medical Commission, and the IITs cannot design their own doctors.Professor Chakraborty is emphatic that they should not try. "We should not seek to weaken or circumvent the NMC framework," he said. "The core competencies required to produce a safe and competent physician are non-negotiable." Dr B.C. Roy Institute of Medical Science and Research at IIT Kharagpur, the teaching hospital that makes an engineering institute's medical ambitions possible. A medical student must first become an excellent doctor, full stop. The innovation sits around that foundation. "Our objective should be NMC-compliant medical education plus an IIT-enabled translational ecosystem."That leaves the practical road long. A teaching hospital is mandatory, NMC approval is mandatory, and both take years. It is precisely why Kanpur is building beds before it builds an MBBS.WHAT IS THE NATIONAL PROBLEM BEHIND ALL THIS?The numbers explain the urgency better than the philosophy does.Imports account for roughly 60 per cent of India's medical-device consumption. In 2024-25, the country imported medical devices worth about Rs 1.37 lakh crore, close to 8.8 billion dollars, against exports of Rs 42,360 crore. In high-technology, the dependence runs deeper still.Professor Chakraborty was scrupulous about what he would and would not claim. Asked how many villages have no functioning diagnostic equipment, he declined to offer a dramatic figure. "I am not aware of a credible, current national audit," he said. "That absence of reliable granular data is itself revealing." He also pushed back on measuring rural healthcare by whether a machine physically exists, noting that reagents run out, calibration fails, staff are absent, power is unreliable. "For a patient, non-functional access and physical absence can have the same consequence."WHAT WOULD SUCCESS ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE?Asked what single outcome would prove the model worked, Professor Chakraborty's answer was pointedly unromantic. "Not the number of papers. Not the number of patents. Not even the number of start-ups." What would count is a technology conceived in this ecosystem, manufactured in India, clinically validated, regulatorily accepted, deployed at scale, affordable, and demonstrably improving outcomes far from any major hospital.He named the failure condition too, which is rarer. "If technologies emerging from such programmes remain confined to laboratories, publications and demonstration prototypes, then we should have the courage to say that the model has not succeeded."There is a smaller moment from Kanpur that says something similar. Hearing loss is Professor Lalwani's life's work, and colleagues urged him to make it the new school's flagship area. He declined. He did not want Gangwal School's first chapter to read as one man's pet project.Ten years from now, Professor Chakraborty said, he does not want India saying it has world-class AI, world-class engineers and excellent doctors, while a treatable disease progresses in some villages because a Rs 100 diagnostic decision never reached the patient in time.That, in the end, is what three medical schools are being built to prevent. Not a shortage of doctors. A shortage of people who can carry a problem from a patient's bedside to a factory floor and back again.- Ends