National Medical Commission (NMC) is seeking to re-register around 11 lakh doctors to create an updated national medical registry, yet it has failed to register even fresh entrants to the profession despite many state registries sharing records every year, reports Rema Nagarajan.Based on MBBS seats and pass rates, at least 68,000 new doctors should have registered to practice, but only 44,400 entries were recorded in 2025 with at least 24,000 graduates missing in Indian Medical Register. The gap points to potential failure of NMC to sync state and national registries, as required under NMC Act.
NMC pushes old docs to re-register, but can’t net new ones
The National Medical Commission (NMC) is pushing a regulation to make about 11 lakh doctors re-register to create an updated national medical registry, but it has failed to even register fresh entrants to the profession despite many state registries sending it new entries every year.With over 91,000 MBBS seats available in 2020-21, even with an estimated 75-90% pass percentage, at least 68,000 MBBS graduates should have registered to practice in 2025. Yet the Indian Medical Register shows just over 44,400 entries. That means at least 24,000 of those who graduated just last year are missing from the registry.If thousands of foreign medical graduates who register each year are included, the number of freshly minted doctors missing from the registry would be even more. For instance, in 2023, over 10,000 foreign medical graduates passed the qualifying exam, after which they have to complete a mandatory one-year internship before receiving permanent registration that would make them eligible to practice in India. So, most of these 10,000 would have registered in 2025. Thus, the total number of doctors registering in 2025 would be roughly 80,000, but just over half the number (55%) have been added to the registry.Most of the doctors would have registered with state medical councils. However, new entries in state medical council registries are not being reflected in the national registry as the NMC is yet to synchronise all state registries with the national registry. The NMC Act, 2019, had mandated such synchronisation. It is yet to happen, almost six years after the NMC was constituted in Sept 2020. Neither is NMC adding the new entries that many state councils send every year.
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Take Assam Medical Council, for instance. It is a state with only govt medical colleges. In the national registry, there are a total of 25,722 registrations from the state council. It shows only one entry for 2025, zero for 2024 and 2023, 106 entries for 2022 and 353 in 2021. The website shows 890 registered in 2024. There were over 720 seats in Assam in 2015 and 1,000 seats in 2020. How is NMC accepting zero entries in 2023 and 2024, or only 106 in 2022?Similarly, NMC’s registry has a total of 67,142 entries from Kerala with just seven entries in 2025 and 17 in 2024. In 2014, Kerala had 3,650 MBBS seats, which increased to 4,500 by 2020. “We are sending details every year… In the name of a new updated NMR, they are not updating the existing one,” said KSMC chief Dr Harikumaran Nair.If the NMC were to register only those who became doctors in the last five years, including foreign medical graduates, it would have had an updated registry of over 3.5 lakh doctors (32%) of the estimated 11 lakh who are said to be available.