14 yrs on, NMC still trying to update national register of docs | India News

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14 yrs on, NMC still trying to update national register of docs
The National Medical Commission is putting forth a new proposal for mandatory re-registration of doctors across the nation.

Fourteen years after the first attempt to update the national registry for doctors, the National Medical Commission has again proposed to make it mandatory for an estimated 11 lakh doctors in India to re-register through its web portal. This has been done through proposed amendments to the regulations governing registration and licensing. The last such attempt in August 2024 saw barely 32,000 doctors (3%) applying till December last year and just 1,800 (0.2%) being approved for registration.The Registration of Medical Practitioners and Licence to Practice Medicine Regulations 2023 notified in May 2023 stated that all doctors enrolled in the Indian Medical Register or any state medical register “shall update in the web portal of the Ethics & Medical Registration Board within a period of three months of publishing of these Regulation” and obtain the registration number, and a licence to practice which would be valid for five months. A year later, it was clear that it had failed spectacularly. In August last year, in response to a question in Parliament, the health ministry claimed that “application for issuance of National Medical Register (NMR) Identification (ID) is voluntary” though the regulation had clearly mandated it. The proposed amendments have removed the three-month clause and said the period would be stipulated later.Over 13.8 lakh doctors were registered in India at the end of 2025 and it is assumed that 80% of this number (over 11 lakh) would be available as many would have moved out of India, died or stopped practising. “To weed out a fraction of those in the medical register, who might not be actively practising anymore, the NMC is asking all 11 lakh doctors to re-register. Instead, the commission could just take the updated state medical council registers, run a deduplication software and reach out only to those about whom there is any confusion. For the rest, they could issue a unique identification number. They are just repeating an experiment that has already failed,” said Dr KV Babu, an ophthalmologist, one of the 32,000 who had applied through the portal.Section 30 (7) of the NMC Act 2019 states: The Ethics and Medical Registration Board (EMRB) shall ensure electronic synchronisation of the National Register and the State Register in such a manner that any change in one register is automatically reflected in the other register. Six years after the NMC was constituted in September 2020, the latest draft amendments to the 2023 regulation states that the synchronization will be done indicating that it has not been done till now.

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