New Delhi: The National Medical Commission (NMC) has notified new norms for faculty recruitment in medical colleges, heavily diluting standards of appointments for teachers, sparking concerns that this may adversely impact the quality of training offered to new doctors.
The new Medical Institutions (Qualifications of Faculty) Regulations, 2025 says that non-teaching government hospitals with 220 or more beds can now be designated as teaching institutions.
Also, existing specialists with 10 years of experience can be appointed as associate professors, and those with 2 years recruited as assistant professors—without the mandatory Senior Residency, provided they complete the Basic Course in Biomedical Research (BCBR) within two years.
The new norms unveiled 5 July say that consultants working with government institutions for a specified number of years that are recognised by the National Board of Examination for PG equivalent degrees are eligible to apply as faculty.
The NMC said that the regulations, brought in by the Post Graduate Medical Education Board (PGMEB), are designed to widen the pool of eligible faculty and facilitate the expansion of undergraduate (MBBS) and postgraduate (MD/MS) seats in medical colleges across India.
India’s healthcare system is undergoing significant transformation, with the central government announcing a vision to add 75,000 new medical seats over the next five years, it said.
“However, a critical bottleneck has been the availability of qualified faculty required to initiate or expand medical programs. These new regulations are a major step towards unlocking the existing human resource potential within government health systems and optimizing medical education infrastructure,” said the Commission.
In his previous Independence Day speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced that 75,000 medical seats would be created over the next five years for checking the flow of students abroad.
But some senior doctors and faculty members stressed that while the apex medical education regulator is reducing pre-conditions for faculty recruitment to create more colleges and students, “it is missing the point that teachers cannot be created overnight”.
“What the NMC is doing is like making a junior engineer in a government department a professor in an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT),” said Dr Kabir Sardana, professor of dermatology at a central government-run-teaching hospital in New Delhi.
Teaching medicine, Sardana said, requires training and skills, underlining that so far senior residentship was mandatory for teaching and it was appropriate.
NMC chairman Dr B.N.Gangadhar, however, emphasised that specialists working on government colleges, despite no background in teaching, had “wealth of experience” that could be utilised in training new doctors.
“This is a very calculated step we are taking in order to address shortage of faculty in colleges and if this works out to be successful, this could also open the doors to rope in consultants and specialists from the private sector for teaching in medical colleges,” he told ThePrint.
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Faculty norm ‘reforms’
Calling the latest norms as “reforms”, the Commission said that these forward-looking regulations mark a paradigm shift in how faculty eligibility is determined—shifting the focus from rigid service norms to competency, teaching experience, and academic merit.
“By unlocking the untapped potential within the existing government healthcare workforce, this reform will accelerate the expansion of medical education, particularly in underserved areas,” it said in a statement.
The new notification requires new government medical colleges to start UG and PG courses simultaneously, and the NMC said it was a bid to expedite the production of healthcare professionals and teaching faculty.
Also, PG courses can now be started with two faculty members and two seats, relaxing the earlier requirement of three faculty and a senior resident. In addition, bed requirements per unit have also been rationalised for several specialties.
The new regulations also allows more feeder broad specialties for various super specialty programs, enabling better utilisation of existing faculty across departments.
Feeder broad speciality refers to a foundational medical degree or speciality essential for pursuing a super speciality course. For example, before pursuing cardiology, a doctor needs to have pursued general medicine or internal medicine earlier.
Moreover, in addition to Anatomy, Physiology, and Biochemistry, departments of microbiology and Pharmacology can now appoint faculty with MSc-PhD qualifications, rather than those who have a degree in medicine.
These are non-clinical branches finding faculty for which has traditionally been difficult, officials say.
The upper age limit for appointment as Senior Resident was increased to 50 years in pre-clinical and para-clinical subjects such as Anatomy, Physiology, Biochemistry, Pharmacology, Pathology, Microbiology, Forensic Medicine, and Community Medicine. As of now, this age limit is mostly 45 years.
The NMC has also stipulated that experience gained as tutors or demonstrators by candidates with PG qualifications will be considered valid for the purpose of eligibility as assistant professor.
Faculty with super specialty qualifications currently working in broad specialty departments can be formally designated as faculty in their corresponding super specialty departments.
The changes in the faculty recruitment norms, said the regulator, are in line with the national goal of expanding access to quality medical education, strengthening institutional capacity, and producing a robust pipeline of healthcare professionals to serve India’s growing needs.
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Rising seats, lowering bar?
Government statistics show that India has 731 medical colleges offering 1,12,112 MBBS seats and 72,627 post graduate or PG equivalent seats in medicine in the 2024-25 academic session.
The sharp rise in the number of medical colleges and seats in medicine has been achieved over the last decade, mainly driven by allowing district hospitals to upgrade into medical colleges through a central scheme and permitting existing colleges—both public and private—to raise seats.
But those watching India’s medical education policy advise that this rush for numbers seems to be coming at the cost of watered down standards. Many of them also say that those who are not trained to teach medical students should not be pushed into it, without required skills upgradation.
“Doctors are not trained in educational pedagogy during MBBS, which makes it essential for all faculty—regardless of institution—to undergo structured training in medical education,” said Dr Satendra Singh, a senior faculty at the University College of Medical Sciences in New Delhi.
“Many of us have pursued prestigious faculty development programmes like teaching fellowships, and basic courses in medical education are rightly linked to faculty promotions in NMC-regulated medical colleges,” he insisted.
A senior faculty member at the AIIMS, New Delhi also remarked that first deciding to open new colleges on a spree and then lowering the bar to appoint faculty in such colleges could be “disastrous” in the long run.
“The reality is that training of most MBBS doctors is sub bar in most colleges and they primarily chase PG seats in order to ensure employability rather than focusing on clinical training,” said the faculty member.
By allowing under qualified faculty in medical colleges, the AIIMS faculty member argued, the level of training in medicine will deteriorate further and doctors coming out of such a system will be disastrous for the healthcare system.
(Edited by Tony Rai)