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A few years back the Government of India has replaced the Medical Council of India (MCI) with National Medical Commission (NMC) with the claim that it will cure the diseases of MCI and better control of the medical profession will be ensured. But exactly the opposite has happened now, as the functioning of NMC has much to be decided. The number of diseases affecting NMC has increased year after year and the worst is that no medicine is at sight to cure it! Let us look at those diseases!
Disease 1 - Dyspraxia in registration of doctors
A glaring mismatch is there in the number of doctors registered with National and State medical commissions. For example, in Delhi there are only 31,500 doctors as per NMC register, whereas Delhi State Council has 72,600! Where the remaining 40,000 has disappeared? Similarly, there are 2 lakhs doctors in Tamil Nadu register but 1.5 lakhs in NMC register! About 50,000 doctors are missing! More than 1,00,000 doctors in Kerala State register but only 73,000 in National register, a difference of around 30,000! How could it happen? What is going on in NMC? Is it affected by dyspraxia, a developmental coordination disorder? This apart, even after more than 5 years of its constitution NMC has not verified the credentials of doctors in its register, only a few hundred credentials have been verified so far out of 13 lakh doctors practicing in India!
Disease 2 - Hearing and speech impairment about faculty vacancies
There are more than 40 per cent teachers post vacant even in government (AIIMS) colleges, not just this year, it is steadily around 40 per cent from 2022-23, for the past 4 academic years! If it is the case with government colleges, do we need to tell the situations in private colleges and universities? This situation is even after permitting visiting faculties, raising retirement age to 70 and reappointing retired teachers! Open end, ‘How much salary you want’ advertisement was issued by Karnataka government long back because of shortage of senior teachers. I wrote it earlier in my article “Future of Indian Health Care sector – Boom or booby trap” (Pharmabiz 1.11.25). It is not a thing of the past! A recent advertisement on 16th November 25 by the Uttarakhand Government repeated it by telling prospective teachers “you quote, we pay” advertisement, which shows the situation has not changed but worsened! It is not falling on the eyes and ears of NMC as in the case of deaf and dumb!
Disease 3 - Myopia in NRI admissions
No private medical college is afraid of NMC! Otherwise how can we digest the following news: “NRI quota admission racket in private medical colleges, 18 000 PG/UG seats involved fake documents”, note the number is not in tens or hundreds but in thousands! It was in just two States, West Bengal and Odisha alone, imagine total India, you may get giddiness. NMC was not able to see this, maybe due to thousands of KM from Delhi to these States! Is it not showing NMC is affected by myopia or some impairment of vision?
Disease 4 - Paralysis in college regulation
NMC is not able to regulate or control money spinner crorepati private colleges as irregularities and deficiency in running them are mounting. It is reported that there are not only sufficient out-patients and in-patients in those colleges even appointed teachers or admitted students are not there! In West Bengal, for instance, an attendance scam was discovered. Faculty and management were cheating even the biometric attendance system because management used silicon fingers of faculty to mark attendance! NMC shifted to facial authentication system with eyes blinking. Even here Chinese software, cloned SIM card and eye blinking video uploading to mark presence on the NMC portal where used. Poor paralysed NMC has no medicine left! Similarly, not only living teachers and students, even dead bodies are not available in many private medical colleges to teach those students. Cadaver to student ratio is very low in these colleges though medical seats were raised to a maximum! This is the situation with fees regulation also. As per the NMC fees for 50 per cent of the seats in private medical colleges should be at par with those in government medical colleges. But who listens or respects NMC? For example, the fee is just 25 lakh rupees per year for an MBBS seat in Tamil Nadu! This unregulated fee structure fuels vacant MBBS seats. Need data? It was 2,849 MBBS seats in 2024-25 and 4,146 seats in 2022-23 as per NMC. How to cure this disease?
Disease 5 - NMC suffering from congeniality bias
NMC is not ready to seriously attend to the complaints against doctors by the patients. In 5 years allowed all 185 doctors appeals, against State Medical Commission orders, at the same time, it rejected all the 256 appeals by patients. Invariably almost all complaints are decided in favour of doctors - a congeniality bias! State Medical Commissions are still worse, for example, Maharashtra Council has acted on less than 1 per cent of complaints it received from patients during 2021 to 25. Unfortunately, there is no independent ombudsman listening to patient appeal as in the UK and Canada. Psychological treatment and counselling may be required for NMC. Who will give?
Disease 6 - Non-compliance by NMC to instructions
“Supreme court of India (SC) castigates NMC on stipend issue, seeks compliance affidavit” was the newspaper heading 3 months back. Yes, even after that direction by SC, NMC failed to file an affidavit about non-payment of stipend to MBBS interns by private medical colleges. Hence SC reprimanded NMC as above. Is this non-compliance a part of willful disobedience or negligence or attention deficiency syndrome? Readers, come to your own conclusion.
Disease 7 - Suicidality by NMC
Suicidality is defined to include suicidal thoughts, plans, gestures or attempts. Since 2023 NMC is making suicide attempts to kill the medical profession it controls by lowering the cut off marks in NEET PG admissions to zero percentile which is equivalent to a score of minus 40! It is to help private medical colleges to fill medical PG seats by any means, as there are no super rich candidates to pay crores of rupees demanded by them among the thousands of meritorious candidates who have passed NEET PG exam. To help their friends NMC is ready even to kill themselves! Aah! What a sacrifice! How meritorious will the candidates who scored minus 40 marks for 800 be? It is an irony that simultaneously this action of NMC is suicide and murder (of patients)!
Thus, NMC is suffering from many diseases like Dyspraxia, Hearing and speech impairment, Myopia, Paralysis, Congeniality bias, Non-compliance and Suicidality at the same time but without any medicine in sight to cure them. The parent of NMC, our Central government is also not showing any sign of giving treatment and saving it. The God of justice may help it, if not, let us all pray to the Gods in heaven to save India!
(The author is Ex-President, Indian Pharmacy Graduates Association, Madurai, Tamil Nadu)
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