After the government banned the Chinese app, students of India seem to look more suffering. But the students of Pakistan and Nepal are hoping to get back to their campus soon in the coming time.

All those international students who are very much concerned about their academic career have selected to pursue their career in the medicinal field from China. But unfortunately, the borders of China haven’t been opened till now; all the international students face such a large challenge in their studies since they lack practical knowledge on which maximum studies of students lie.

International students are struggling to get back to the campus soon to attend practical offline classes in their respective universities to get rich with practical experience, which they lacked throughout the lockdown period when they were only attending virtual lectures without any real practical experience they used to get to do.

One student shared his struggle with these issues. Sanjeev Gupta,21, a native of Jaipur, Rajasthan, is pursuing his course of MBBS while registered in the well-known University of China from the year 2018. After returning to India for a winter vacation in 2021, he struggled with many students falling in the same category to get some response from the authorities in their favor to reach back to their universities. According to Sanjeev Gupta, “Universities are themselves confused for the time till when they would call them back, and the government ministry is not able to provide any update information till when they would be updating it. Any letter that we wrote to authorities hasn’t been responded to yet. Now the time has come to start a new semester in our university, which is from 19 February and we have no idea till now what is going to happen. When they would call us back, still no clue.”

After analyzing the important data which the Indian Embassy in China gives during the period of covid, there seem 20,000 students from India who got enrolled for a medical degree. Do you know why students from India move to China to pursue a medical degree in MBBS? So the simple answer is because the study there is much affordable. According to Sanjeev Gupta, if we calculate annual fees that we need to pay, it comes much less than Indian college’s MBBS fees which are about 2.5 lakh per annum. Still, Indian private colleges charge huge fees ranging from 4 lakh to 20 crores per annum.

Another important reason Indian students go to China for an MBBS degree is the tough competition in the NEET-UG exam. About 16 lakhs of students fight for the about 83,000 seats only available in government medical colleges in India. Indian students claim to have been suffering a lot of challenges after the Indian government has banned Chinese apps. Gupta said that as all the universities hold their classes online, Chinese universities also function remotely. As all the world uses globally accessed apps like Google Meet, Zoom, MS Team, and various other applications, Chinese universities are using the apps developed in their own country like WeChat, SuperStar, and mostly the DingTalk app, which is commonly called Ding-Ding.

According to Rohit Kumar Yadav, who is currently a 4th-year student at Shihezi University pursuing MBBS, shares their struggle, “After the government of India has banned the Chinese app which includes that app also which they use to study online, but after they had banned their studies have hindered a lot. But because of urgent need, we use VPN to access these banned apps to attend our regular classes, but the system runs slow on this, and even the audio & video quality of these apps becomes worse. We urge our government to at least remove the ban from these apps since there is hope which is looking for having regular offline classes so that they can grab at least theoretical knowledge which all other students in their respective batches are gaining thus they won’t lag much from other competitor students who have access to classes properly.

He also said they hadn’t gotten any lab classes to get practical knowledge. They are sure that their universities will not extend the period of their degree any further to impart practical knowledge when the universities finally open in the coming future. According to the structure, of course, every student needs to have experience of practical clinical training by doing physical duty for about at least one year. At the same time, we have continued to get only theoretical knowledge for the past two years. Thus universities need to extend the tenure of this course from usually six years to about 7-8 years which would help them get innovative, skillful experience in physical duty in their course. All these things we are lacking now are impacting the professional and financial planning that we have planned so far.

Whether the issues that were going between India and China during the pandemic period which seems to worsen the relationship between two countries have impacted the Indian students to stop their study from China, for this Gupta refused and told it was not such a big political issue, if it might be the case then China would have been banning the entry of students from Indian country but hadn’t done anything so.

Even the government of China has not restricted any app developed in China, but they have an issue that if by mistake they have been signed out, they require the SIM cards from China to log in back to get these apps.

Abhishek Jaiswal, currently doing his 12th from the Capital & Research Center in Kathmandu, Nepal, faces similar difficulties. Now Jaiswal will complete his degree in 2024, and he is unaware of the university he is registered in. According to him, “They have a bad learning environment in their hometown. As we all know, the MBBS degree is wholly practical based, which they lag due to restrictions imposed after the covid outbreak. We all are hoping that we can go back to our Chinese universities as soon as possible so that we can continue our MBBS with practical knowledge also.”