Background: Emergency Medicine is an emerging specialty in the Indian medical scenario. Our study, which is first in India and second worldwide, assessed the perception of other specialties regarding the present status, purpose and the future of Emergency Care in India. Method: A multicentre, questionnaire based survey was conducted amongst 106 randomly selected consultants from other specialties in four tertiary care hospitals in Kolkata, India. Results: 97.17% of respondents felt that the official term for the specialty should be ‘‘Emergency Medicine’’ (40.57%) OR “Emergency Medicine & Accident /Trauma Care” (56.60%). 93.40% of the participants perceived that at least 1 Emergency Physician per shift, registrars and 12 beds would be needed for a “fully equipped ED”. 85.05% and 51.72% of the respondents felt that Resuscitation and Rapid sequence intubation should be done by Emergency physicians. Most of the respondents (96%) felt that ED physician(s) had excellent resuscitation skills. Most of the respondents (90%) felt that emergency medicine has an excellent future as an independent specialty. Conclusion: The principal finding our study is that Emergency Medicine, as a specialty in India, is accepted by other departments. The expectations are high and there are potential areas with significant scope of improvement. The perceived purposes and strengths provide a focus on proper training and development of Emergency Medicine, while opinions on new practices and weaknesses indicate scope of improvement. The results can contribute to decision-making for structuring proper Emergency Departments. Further similar studies on a wider scale involving other parts of India need to be done to ensure generelizability of the results.

KEYWORDS: Emergency Medicine.