Doctors in waiting: Why foreign medical graduates are on tenterhooks

Students wait for NMC to clear the air over internship, licence and registration guidelines

Indian medical graduates enrolled in higher education institutes in China, Malaysia, and the Philippines have been waiting for nearly two years for clarity on their careers ahead. The National Medical Commission (NMC), the regulator, had last year mandated that foreign medical graduates, or FMGs, who had completed their fourth and fifth years online due to the pandemic, require a two-year internship after their MBBS instead of one.  

Since the NMC’s circular mandated this retrospectively, it covered even those FMGs who had received their provisional and permanent registration certificates, throwing them into a tizzy. While the mandate is clearly applicable to