Data Disaster: NMC doctor count under fire after massive discrepancies revealed
Corruption Allegations
New Delhi: Providing details regarding the number of available doctors in India, the Union Health Ministry recently told the Parliament that the National Medical Commission (NMC) data counted 13,86,157 registered doctors in India.
However, the number provided by the Ministry last year was also almost identical. In August last year, the Ministry informed the Lok Sabha that 13,86,136 doctors were available in India.
Therefore, if these two figures are compared, only 21 doctors were added to the country over the past year, even though around 80,000 doctors were graduated.
TOI has reported that such discrepancies are not found only with respect to the number of doctors in the country, but the cross-checking of the state-wise NMC data last year also showed a mismatch.
Medical Dialogues recently reported that in response to an RTI, the Delhi Medical Council informed that a total of 72,636 doctors were registered with it as of 2020. However, on 2 August 2024, in a written reply to the Lok Sabha, the Union Health Ministry submitted a state-wise count of registered allopathic doctors across India. According to the data provided in Lok Sabha, Delhi had 31,479 registered doctors under the Delhi Medical Council, which showed a mismatch of over 40,000 doctors, compared to the medical council's data.
As per the latest media report by the Times of India, even though last year NMC submitted that the Kerala Medical Council had more than 73,000 doctors registered with it, a Council member told TOI that the number is over 1 lakh, indicating a difference of 36,000.
A similar data discrepancy could be noticed in respect to Tamil Nadu as well. Even though NMC reported fewer than 1.5 lakh registered medical practitioners in Tamil Nadu, according to the State Council's figures, there are more than 2 lakh practitioners in India.
Such huge variations between the actual registrations in State Medical Councils and the data submitted by NMC also affect the calculation of the doctor-to-population ratio. For instance, in Delhi's case, the NMC data is more than 66% less than the Delhi Medical Council's count. In the case of Kerala, the data is off by 33%.
Recently, speaking to Medical Dialogues, the National General Secretary of United Doctors Front (UDF), Dr. Arun Kumar, who had filed the RTI before the Delhi Medical Council, called the data mismatch "a systemic collapse of accountability".
"The numbers shared in Parliament were not cross-verified with the Delhi Medical Council - the primary statutory authority. Instead, they came from a centralized file sitting in some NMC or MoHFW office - old, outdated, unverified. There’s no real-time, unified doctor registry in India. Each state council works independently. The NMC doesn’t maintain a live-linked database. So, when Parliament asks, officials scramble, copy-paste from previous replies, and move on," Dr. Kumar had said.
Ever since NMC replaced the erstwhile Medical Council of India in 2020, the plans of activating a dynamic database, which will be a central repository of all registered doctors, have been in the works.
NMC launched the National Medical Registrar (NMR) portal on 23.08.2024 and asked all registered medical practitioners to enter their details on the portal. The portal was envisioned as a transformative initiative to centralize and streamline the registration of doctors across India.
The Right to Information (RTI) applications revealed that even after eight months of NMR being launched, NMC received only 10,411 applications for doctors' registration on NMR.
Commenting on the issue, a Kerala Medical Council member told TOI, "NMC is totally defunct. Appointments are not made on time. Most posts have been lying vacant for more than a year. They don't even respond to communication from state councils. There has been no process to update their database or to bring in a system by which additions to the state councils will lead to automatic updation of NMC's registry."
