NEW DELHI: The National Medical Commission (NMC) has made a second U-turn on the National Medical Register (NMR), proposing to make it mandatory again for registration and obtaining a licence to practice medicine in any state, after making the process voluntary in 2025 when the centralised register failed to take off.
Two years ago, the NMC made the NMR, a centralised database for modern medicine practitioners in the country, mandatory. However, after it failed to take off even after a year, the Union Health Ministry was forced to announce in Parliament through a written reply that it was voluntary. Now, in its draft Registration of Medical Practitioners and License to Practice Medicine (Amendment) Regulations, 2026, the NMC has inserted the requirement again for registration and obtaining a licence to practice in any state.
The proposal states that “the NMR shall be a national register of medical practitioners maintained by the Ethics and Medical Registration Board (EMRB) as specified in Section 31 of the NMC Act, 2019, with a Unique Identification (UID) Number assigned to every medical practitioner registered under State Medical Register (SMR) maintained by the State Medical Councils.”
It further says that “the NMR number shall be valid for medical practice across India, in accordance with the provisions of these Regulations.”
The draft notification says, “The National Medical Register shall serve as the central repository of the registration particulars of Registered Medical Practitioners (RMPs) and of any disciplinary proceedings, orders of suspension, removal, restoration, or any such order issued by a State Medical Council, the Ethics and Medical Registration Board, or the National Medical Commission.” This paper was the first to report that the NMR portal, launched with great fanfare by Union Health Minister JP Nadda on August 23, 2024, had failed to register RMPs.
After multiple hurdles were encountered in enrolling doctors on the portal, Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare Anupriya Patel said in a written Lok Sabha reply on August 8, 2025, “National Medical Commission (NMC) has informed that the application for issuance of National Medical Register (NMR) Identification (ID) is voluntary.”
According to the NMC’s minutes on January 7, 2026, reported by this paper, only 1,800 RMPs were registered in the NMR as of December last year. As many as 30,000 applications were pending verification with State Medical Councils (SMCs) and the NMC. India has an estimated 14 lakh modern medical practitioners.
According to IMA National President Dr Anil Kumar Nayak, the NMR portal did not work earlier and doctors faced many challenges in registering. “We even brought it to the knowledge of the former NMC Chairman.”
RTI activist Dr KV Babu said, “There is no need for any RMP whose name is in the SMC or erstwhile IMR to register in the NMR again!” The draft requires RMPs without registration numbers to update records on the EMRB web portal within three months and obtain a registration number as a one-time measure. It also says a licence must be applied for through the portal.