Medical Education Crisis: Suicides, Ghost Faculty & Patchy Works

Scratch beneath NMC’s glitzy presentations, press releases, and declarations of digital breakthroughs, and the rot begins to show

By P SESH KUMAR

NEW DELHI, JULY 31, 2025 — The National Medical Commission (NMC), conceived as a forward-looking alternative to the outdated Medical Council of India, has projected itself as the architect of a reimagined medical education ecosystem. From competency-based learning and digital health integration to the promise of uniform licensure through the long-awaited NEXT, the NMC has no shortage of ambitious reforms. But as the curtain lifts on 2025, a wave of inspection scams, student suicides, ghost faculty revelations, and patchy execution paint a far murkier picture.

When the National Medical Commission replaced the discredited Medical Council of India in 2019, the message was bold and unambiguous—Indian medical education was ready to enter the 21st century. The Commission was armed with four domain-specific boards (undergraduate medical education, post graduate medical education, assessment and rating and ethics and registration) meant to bring focus, transparency and modernity into an ecosystem often accused of being corrupt, outdated, and elitist.

Fast forward to 2025, the NMC insists it has delivered on that promise. But scratch beneath the surface of glitzy presentations, press releases, and declarations of digital breakthroughs, and the rot begins to show.

One of the loudest trumpets NMC has blown is its switch to the Competency-Based Medical Education (CBME) system—a move celebrated as a tectonic shift away from rote memorization to hands-on, skill-based learning.

Nearly 100,000 MBBS students across over 600 colleges are now supposedly being trained under this system. Yet, in campus after campus, especially outside metro cities, students complain of poorly equipped skills labs, outdated or absent simulators, and overworked faculty ill-equipped to mentor under the new regime.

What was meant to be a revolution has become a ritual in too many colleges, where CBME is reduced to a list of skills ticked off in registers, irrespective of actual mastery.

Digital reforms also feature prominently in the NMC’s self-congratulatory narrative. All medical colleges are now mandated to integrate Ayushman Bharat Health Account IDs (ABHA-ID) into patient registration—a move that supposedly brings India in line with global benchmarks like NHS’s patient record systems in the UK or EMR-based monitoring in the US.

But as always, policy has outpaced infrastructure. In many state-run medical colleges, ABHA-based integration struggles to take off due to weak connectivity, staff unfamiliarity, and lack of technical support. Clinical exposure is still being documented manually, with electronic record-keeping relegated to a ceremonial click in some corner of the OPD.

NMC’s most quoted success story remains the expansion in numbers. The MBBS intake has jumped from around 83,000 in 2020 to 118,000 in 2025. (An answer to a Parliament question in July 2025 pegged the intake figures at 1,15,900). Postgraduate seats have leapt from 42,000 to over 70,000 (Answer ibid, says 74,306).

More than 150 new medical colleges have been added to the national roster, 75 of them under a centrally sponsored scheme aimed at underserved regions. These numbers need to be applauded indeed.

Yet, questions about quality persist. Are these colleges functional in any meaningful way? Do they have trained faculty, sufficient patient load, working laboratories and decent hostels? Numerous inspections and media reports suggest otherwise.

Expansion without quality is simply mass production. We may soon find ourselves with thousands of degrees, but not enough competent doctors.

And then comes the ghost in the closet—literally. The CBI’s raids (almost every year in May-July) and particularly in May and June 2025 on multiple private medical colleges exposed the rampant malpractice of “ghost faculty” and staged inspections.

These revelations are not new but the scale is staggering. Colleges allegedly brought in dummy faculty just for inspection day, had documents forged, and even bribed inspection teams to obtain or retain approval. While the NMC itself does not have arresting powers, the Central Bureau of Investigation swooped in following tip-offs and filed FIRs.

The raids, spread across states like Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, and Telangana, confirmed what insiders have whispered for years—that despite a new name and architecture, old evils continue to haunt the system.

Academic oversight by the Medical Assessment and Rating Board (MARB) was meant to fix exactly this problem. Surprise inspections, audit-based accreditation, and transparent grading were supposed to bring rigour into the approval process. But the fact that CBI—not NMC—had to expose the racket speaks volumes about MARB’s functional paralysis or worse, some critics may say, its complicity. One cannot run with reform on one leg and keep dragging the other in the mire of old compromises.

Equally grim is the story of medical student well-being. In April 2024, the Supreme Court of India had to step in to direct the Centre, NMC, and State Governments to come up with time-bound and structured measures to prevent stress-induced suicides among NEET aspirants and medical students.

The Court’s ruling in Anurag Bhushan vs Union of India & Ors (2024 SCC OnLine SC 532) acknowledged that intense pressure from the coaching industry, combined with lack of emotional support and systemic insensitivity, was pushing students to the edge.

The Court asked for robust mental health support, humane evaluation systems, and regulation of coaching institutes—an indictment of NMC’s failure to anticipate and address this crisis. Yet, beyond announcing helplines and some guidelines, there has been little visible change in how students experience this system—many still feel unheard, unprotected and unvalued.

Recent Supreme Court Judgment – NEET Coaching and Student Suicide Prevention

On July 25, 2025, a Supreme Court bench comprising Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta delivered a landmark judgment in a plea concerning the death of a 17‑year‑old NEET aspirant in Visakhapatnam. The petition, filed by her father after the Andhra Pradesh High Court declined a CBI probe, led the Supreme Court to transfer the investigation to the CBI, citing serious investigative lapses, police negligence, and institutional failures.

Binding 15‑Point Guidelines

In addition to ordering a CBI inquiry, the Court issued 15 mandatory nationwide directives to all educational institutions—including schools, colleges, coaching centres, universities, hostels, and training academies—to proactively safeguard students’ mental health and prevent suicides. These interim guidelines will remain binding until formal legislation or regulatory frameworks are enacted.

Some of the key mandates include:

• Every institution must adopt a uniform mental health policy, inspired by the Ummeed guidelines, the Manodarpan initiative, and the National Suicide Prevention Strategy; this must be reviewed annually and publicly displayed  .
• Institutions with 100 or more students must appoint at least one full-time trained counsellor or psychologist; smaller institutions must establish formal referral links with external mental health professionals.
• Optimized counsellor-to-student ratios, and appointment of dedicated mentors during exam seasons or academic transitions for informal, confidential support.
• A ban on performance-based batch segregation, public shaming, and unrealistic academic targeting in coaching and educational institutions.
• Mandatory twice-yearly training for all academic and non‑teaching staff, covering psychological first aid, identifying warning signs, responding to self-harm risks, and referral procedures.
• Institutions must display suicide helpline numbers (e.g., Tele-MANAS) prominently in classrooms, hostels, websites, and notice boards; establish protocols for immediate referral to mental health services or hospitals.
• Residential institutions must install tamper-proof fans, restrict access to rooftops/balconies, and other high-risk areas to deter impulsive acts of self-harm.
• District-level monitoring committees, headed by District Magistrates, are mandated to oversee compliance, inspections, and grievance redressal.
• All states/UTs must notify rules within two months to register and regulate private coaching centres and adopt student protection norms and grievance mechanisms.
• The Union government must file a compliance affidavit within 90 days, detailing steps taken to implement the guidelines, coordination with States, and progress of the National Task Force on student mental health.
• Institutions must maintain anonymised annual records of wellness initiatives, referrals, training sessions, and mental health-related interventions, and submit these to relevant regulators.

The Supreme Court has scheduled a follow‑up hearing on October 27, 2025, specifically to review institutional and governmental compliance with these directives.

We now come to the the much-awaited National Exit Test (NEXT) which remains in limbo. Slated to replace the final MBBS exam, NEET-PG and the Foreign Medical Graduates Examination, it could have been the great equalizer—ensuring standardized, merit-based evaluation across India. But its repeated deferment and shifting timelines have thrown students and institutions into confusion. NEXT has become the reform that’s always arriving, never arriving. Its operational guidelines remain a mystery. There is no clarity on how it will be phased in, assessed, or what it will actually test. In the absence of transparency, coaching centres have already started marketing “NEXT prep” packages—defeating the very purpose of reform

Faculty training is another area where the NMC loves to pat its back. Over 20,000 teachers have reportedly been trained in modern pedagogy, virtual dissection, AI-based simulations and telemedicine education. Some institutions do report the successful integration of these tools. But many others, especially newer or semi-urban/rural colleges, simply lack the funding, hardware or personnel to make this vision real. Teaching remains didactic, mentorship is rare, and e-learning is often reduced to preloaded PDFs on poorly functioning platforms.

NMC has also been pushing mandatory rural postings, digital health outreach, and bond service requirements to bridge India’s urban-rural healthcare divide. But unless backed by proper housing, safety, incentives, and local integration, these well-meaning policies end up becoming punishment transfers. Students and young doctors feel coerced rather than inspired. Bond defaults are rising, and litigations are piling up in state high courts challenging the legality and fairness of such mandates. One has to acknowledge that NMC cannot enforce these prescriptions without support from State Governments.

Research has seen a modest push, with 6,000 undergraduate projects and several funded initiatives cited between 2022 and 2024. Plagiarism checks on PG theses appear to have been introduced, and certain colleges now receive up to ₹50 lakh annually for research infrastructure. This is a step forward. But research culture requires more than funding—it demands mentoring, critical inquiry, and time. In a system obsessed with completing quotas and clearing exams, there’s little room for curiosity or innovation.

Yes, the NMC has made strides. It has brought new ideas into the system, attempted a digital and academic upgrade, and pushed India’s medical education discourse into mainstream policy debates. But can it be oblivious of the criticism that it remains trapped between ambition and execution, between policy and practicality? The facade of reform is often stronger than the foundation. Numbers should not be used to camouflage realities, however tempting it may be. One cannot ignore that the students are left navigating a maze of change, uncertainty and occasional despair.

India Needs Grounded Reform

What India’s medical education needs today is not just bold reform, but grounded reform. The NMC must invite periodic third-party evaluations of its flagship initiatives—CBME, ABHA integration, NEXT, digital platforms, and rural bonding schemes. State Medical Councils should be empowered and made partners in regulation. Inspections must be randomized, anonymized, and preferably AI-assisted to detect anomalies. Ghost faculty scandals must result not just in FIRs but in permanent blacklisting of institutions. Mental health of students should be front and centre, not an afterthought. The NEXT exam must be preceded by extensive public consultations and trial runs. The teaching fraternity must be incentivized and empowered to adopt and co-create reforms.

Above all, the NMC must speak less and listen more. The voices of students, interns, residents, teachers and patients need to shape the future of India’s medical education—not just those of bureaucrats and policy architects. If the NMC is serious about being more than a new name on an old building, it must leave behind its PR script and embrace ground reality.

(This is an opinion piece, and views expressed are those of the author only)

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