MBBS Admissions: Between Govt Narratives and Ground Realities
Patients at AIIMs in New Delhi. Image credit The Raisina Hills
From CBI raids on ghost faculty to litigation over NMC guidelines, India’s medical education reforms remain caught between promises of expansion and persistent malpractice
By P SESH KUMAR
NEW DELHI, August 20, 2025 — Every summer, between May and August, the aspirations of hundreds of thousands of young Indians collide with the messy underbelly of the country’s medical education system. This is the anxious season when MBBS hopefuls wait for seats, but it is also the season of CBI raids exposing ghost faculty, of medical colleges dragged to courts, and of yet another round of debate over the effectiveness of regulation by the National Medical Commission (NMC).
The government is quick to remind us of the “historic” increase in MBBS seats since 2014 and the supposed transparency introduced by the NMC. But the reality is more complicated. Without an independent, robust third-party evaluation of these reforms, what we are left with are official narratives of success on the one hand, and recurring scandals and litigations on the other. Enforcement action may catch the recalcitrant colleges, but the question remains: is India’s medical education system really being fixed, or merely being patched?
In August 2025, the Government of India declared in Parliament that the National Medical Commission (NMC) had not imposed any freeze on new medical colleges or MBBS seat increases. The statement was meant to calm a sector rattled by bribery scandals, CBI raids, and whispers of paralysis. But beneath the denial lies a deeper story—of political compulsions, regulatory games, and the paradox of accountability.
While the government flaunts expansion numbers, the watchdog best placed to test the credibility of these claims—the Comptroller and Auditor General—remains locked out unless invited. And why would any government call in the auditor when selective data can so easily mask uncomfortable truths?
Parliament’s Assurance: A Confident Denial
On 20 August 2025, Minister of State for Health Anupriya Patel rose in the Rajya Sabha and killed the suspense with a single line: “There is no decision by NMC to freeze approvals.” Her words cut through weeks of speculation. Media outlets had reported that NMC, rattled by corruption scandals, had slammed the brakes on all approvals for the 2025–26 academic year. Patel’s answer was an emphatic course correction: the pipeline was alive, the gates open, the process intact.
She painted the picture of a rigorous approval system. Applications are filed on the NMC’s digital portal, vetted by the Medical Assessment and Rating Board (MARB) under Sections 28 and 29 of the NMC Act, 2019 and the 2023 Establishment Regulations. Every applicant must demonstrate compliance with Minimum Standard Requirements—faculty, hospital load, labs, libraries, hostels. Assessors are randomly selected to reduce bias. Reports go through layers of scrutiny, and deficiencies trigger show-cause notices.
Most impressively, the NMC now boasts a basket of surveillance tools: Aadhaar-based attendance, HMIS data, video feeds, time-stamped photos, and the occasional surprise inspection. No Letter of Permission, Patel insisted, is issued unless all these gates are cleared.
On paper, it sounds watertight. But the story does not begin or end with that tidy assurance.
The Freeze That Wasn’t—And Was
Barely a month earlier, India’s medical education regulator had been in the dock. The CBI raided officials of the NMC and Health Ministry, unearthing a racket where bribes secured approvals for colleges that existed only in files and photographs. Ghost faculty, fake patients, cosmetic wards—all certified for a price. Over 30 people were arrested, FIRs named senior officers, and suddenly the credibility of the entire regulatory regime collapsed.
Faced with this inferno, the NMC announced a blanket freeze in July 2025: no new colleges, no seat increases, no renewals. The freeze was extraordinary—an implicit admission that the system had been compromised at its core. For states banking on new colleges as electoral trophies, the news was devastating. For lakhs of NEET aspirants, it was a nightmare.
By mid-August, however, the costs of a standstill had become unbearable. A freeze meant stalled projects in politically sensitive states, lawsuits from rejected colleges, and a public perception of collapse. So when Anupriya Patel told Parliament there was no freeze, she wasn’t rewriting history—she was burying it. The freeze had existed, but it was now officially erased.
Numbers Versus Quality
The government’s urgency to lift the cloud is explained by the paradox of expansion. India has doubled MBBS seats in a decade—from about 50,000 in 2014 to over 1.08 lakh in 2025. Yet demand still dwarfs supply: nearly 23 lakh students appeared for NEET-UG 2025.
Every state wants more colleges, more seats, more ribbon-cuttings. But expansion has created colleges where teaching hospitals are hollow shells, libraries hold token books, and faculty rosters are padded with names that rarely appear on campus. The July scandal merely confirmed what insiders had whispered for years: that numbers were being bought, not built.
Hence the racy dance in Parliament: the government cannot afford to shut the expansion tap, but it must also promise the public that quality has not been sold. Patel’s assurance tried to thread that impossible needle.
Courts, Politics, Optics
A freeze would not only have hurt politically, it would have triggered a litigation avalanche. Every year, denied colleges rush to High Courts and the Supreme Court. A blanket halt would have been challenged as arbitrary and capricious. By declaring in Parliament that the process is alive, the government immunized itself from judicial rebuke.
The messaging also served multiple constituencies: states got their capacity pipelines back, parents were reassured that NEET had not become meaningless, and critics were told corruption was a temporary blip, not systemic rot. It was politics dressed up as policy.
Enforcement and Evasion
The tools of oversight described in Parliament are impressive on paper. Aadhaar attendance, HMIS, video surveillance—all sound unassailable. Yet the July raids showed how easily they can be gamed. Proxies log in under borrowed Aadhaar cards. HMIS entries are doctored. Cameras are turned to sparkling wards while neglected units remain unseen.
The government’s claim of “rigorous verification” is thus both true and hollow. The tools exist, but without uncompromising enforcement they are just props in a regulatory theatre.
The Audit Mirage
In theory, the one institution capable of puncturing this theatre is the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG). Imagine a performance audit comparing sanctioned seats to actual patient loads, checking Aadhaar logs against real faculty, or mapping how “new” colleges curiously cluster in ruling-party bastions. The revelations would be devastating.
But here lies the paradox: the NMC Act, 2019 does not empower the CAG to audit its regulatory effectiveness. To examine approvals, efficiency, or outcomes, the government must itself entrust the task under Section 20(1) of the CAG’s DPC Act, 1971. In other words, the watchdog cannot bite unless the master unleashes it. Only NMC’s accounts are subject to CAG audit, as things stand which has limited scope.
And why would any government do that? Why invite a bruising audit that could headline failures, expose corruption, and embarrass the ruling party? Far easier to flaunt selective statistics—that seats have doubled, that India is the world’s largest medical education hub, that new colleges are blooming in rural districts. All of these claims may be factually true, but they are often stripped of context and padded with silence about quality.
This is the audit mirage: accountability exists in law, but political incentives ensure it remains a ghost. The government can bask in its own narrative of success while burying the uncomfortable truths that only an independent audit could reveal.
A Yellow Signal, Not Green
The parliamentary answer of “no freeze” was not merely an administrative clarification; it was a political act. It turned a month of scandal into a story of resilience, and it re-opened the doors to expansion just in time to calm students, states, and courts. But it did nothing to address the structural rot that the CBI scandal exposed.
The truth is stark. Expansion will continue because India needs doctors and politicians need ribbon-cuttings. Compliance will be touted as digitized and randomized, but in practice, evasion will chase enforcement in an endless game. And the CAG, the one institution capable of breaking this cycle with a performance audit, will remain locked out—because no government wants to hand its critic a scalpel.
So yes, there is “no freeze.” But there is also no guarantee. What India has is a system lurching forward under suspicion, expanding in numbers while credibility limps behind. The light at the end of the tunnel is not green. It is flashing yellow.
(This is an opinion piece, and views expressed are those of the author only)
Follow The Raisina Hills on WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn
About The Author
