The Maharashtra Medical Council has announced plans to implement a layered, three-tier security framework alongside regular security audits, to be carried out by accredited cybersecurity firms, following a breach that allowed unauthorised parties to produce 22 counterfeit medical degrees for students across Maharashtra.
Desk officers at the MMC identified the irregularity in August, when registrations granted to foreign medical graduates were found to lack the clearances that regulations require before such approvals can be issued.
Cyber police in Maharashtra uncovered an inter-state network of fraudulent certificate procurement this week, detaining Nashik-based agent Rahul Patil alongside two foreign medical graduates from Buldhana — Varun Akhade, 28, and Sanket Unhale, 26 — each of whom is alleged to have paid lakhs of rupees to obtain the documents.
The episode has brought into view the barriers that persist for foreign medical graduates well beyond the point of earning their degrees overseas. The Foreign Medical Graduate Examinations (FMGE), a licensing test run by the National Board of Examination in Medical Sciences (NBEMS), forms the gateway through which this bottleneck takes hold. Physicians who complete their medical training at overseas institutions are required to pass the FMGE examination before they can be granted registration to practise medicine within India, with registration at any state medical council available only to those who have passed that examination.
State-level cross-verification forms one part of the process, with MMC president Dr Sanjay Kadam noting that documents submitted by foreign medical graduates are checked against both NMC records and the relevant issuing medical boards before MMC registration is granted.
The pass rate for the Foreign Medical Graduates Examination stood at just 12.38 per cent in the June 2026 sitting, according to Dr Apurv Dalvi, national convenor of the Foreign Medical Graduates Association wing of the All-India Medical Students Association. Dr Dalvi noted that candidates are required to cover five years' worth of medical syllabus within a single five-hour paper, a workload he described as amounting to repeating roughly five years of formal study from scratch. Questions drawn from outside the standard syllabus also find their way into the assessment on occasion.
Examination formats have undergone repeated revisions over time. The April 2026 examination introduced video-based questions, and foreign medical graduates who gathered at Jantar Mantar in Delhi on 3 August to raise concerns about testing conditions subsequently saw the number of annual examinations rise from two to three. The National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences also brought the examination fee down from ₹6,195 to approximately ₹4,650, outcomes that Dr Dalvi attributed to the advocacy effort.
Foreign medical graduates face no ceiling on the number of attempts allowed for the screening examination, though all attempts are to be completed within a decade of beginning their first year of medical study. Separately, the financial burden of private medical college tuition in India — where annual fees can reach ₹25 lakh, pushing the total degree cost beyond one crore rupees — has led representatives of medical associations to note that training abroad can be obtained at roughly one-quarter of that expense.
Dr Dalvi noted that overseas medical programmes can be completed for around ₹25 lakh, a figure that covers travel and accommodation, and advised prospective students to verify in advance that any institution they consider appears on the NMC's published list of international colleges whose curricula align with India's own medical training framework.
The NMC has set out a curriculum structure spanning 4.5 years of theoretical instruction followed by a one-year internship. Dr Kadam noted that the standards help distinguish practitioners who hold proper qualifications from those who do not, a distinction that he said serves both the medical profession and the patients it treats.
