Is my university NMC approved?

If you have spent a week reading MBBS-abroad websites, you have seen the phrase on every one of them. Green tick, “NMC Approved”, sometimes “WHO Approved” underneath. We had it on this site too, on 127 university entries, until we went looking for the list it was supposed to come from and could not find one.

This page is what we found. It is long because the honest answer has a few parts, and because the short version — “that is not a real thing” — is useless to somebody who has to choose a university next month.

Why every website says it

Because it used to be true. The Medical Council of India did publish a list of foreign medical institutions, put together from information supplied by Indian embassies and high commissions. Agents quoted it, students asked for it, and “MCI approved” meant something you could check.

MCI was wound up in 2020 and NMC took over. NMC did not carry the list forward. It went further and said, in one line on its study-abroad page, that it endorses no such list. The phrase in the industry simply changed from “MCI approved” to “NMC approved” and nobody checked whether the thing behind it still existed.

The old data has not entirely gone, which is part of why the belief survives. An MCI-era API endpoint still answers on NMC’s own domain and returns 496 institutions across 73 countries, 72 of them in Russia and 23 in Georgia. No page on NMC’s site links to it. The front-end that used to display it redirects to a login screen. And it is stale in a way that matters: it still lists the Belize colleges that NMC told students to avoid in July 2025. If somebody shows you a list, this is probably where it came from.

What NMC actually says

Here is the paragraph, from NMC’s page for students going abroad, quoted in full because it is short and it settles the question:

“It may be noted that the erstwhile Medical Council of India had provided a list of foreign Medical Institutions/Universities for MBBS or equivalent course based upon the information received from the Indian Embassy/High Commission of India concerned. However… It is to clarify that the National Medical Commission does not endorse any list of Foreign Medical Institutions/ Universities for MBBS or equivalent course.”

That is the whole basis for everything else on this page. NMC names foreign universities in one situation only, which is when it wants to warn you about one. There are eight such notices since 2021 and they are listed below. There is no positive counterpart.

The checklist that replaced the list

FMGL-2021 has a Schedule-I, and its title is worth reading slowly: “Criteria to recognise foreign medical graduates applying for licence or permanent registration to practise in India”. Criteria, and graduates. Not a list, and not institutions. If somebody tells you to check the “NMC 2021 list” before you take admission, this is what they mean, and the advice is good.

Regulation 4 sets out what your degree has to satisfy:

• ›At least 54 months of study for the degree itself.
• ›A 12-month internship at the same foreign institution. Not a different one, and not split across countries.
• ›English as the medium of instruction.
• ›The subjects listed in Schedule-I.
• ›A qualification that lets you register and practise medicine in that country, on the same footing as its own citizens.
• ›After you come home, a further 12-month supervised internship in India, applied for through the Commission.

Then you sit FMGE. Two conditions catch people more than the rest. The first is the internship: a lot of six-year degrees, Russian ones especially, are a single continuous programme with no separate internship year in the sense NMC means, and postgraduate training is a different qualification entirely. The second is the licence condition, because it depends on the university keeping its own accreditation at home — and that can be taken away, as the Armenian case below shows.

Two things that look like approval and are not

Once people accept there is no approved list, they usually reach for the nearest substitute. There are two popular ones and both fail the same test.

A World Directory listing

The World Directory of Medical Schools is a genuine, useful reference and you should check it. It is not approval. The directory says so on its own results page: listing “does not denote recognition, accreditation, or endorsement”. It confirms the school exists and is operating.

Test it against a real case. All three Uzbek universities NMC issued an alert about in April 2026 are in the directory. Bukhara State Medical Institute is F0000095, Samarkand is F0001564, Tashkent State Medical University is F0002249. Listed, and alerted, at the same time.

Students who sat FMGE

This one sounds airtight. If NMC lets a university’s graduates sit the exam, surely NMC accepts the university. It does not work that way. NBEMS does not screen institutions in advance; eligibility is assessed for each candidate at registration, against the FMGL criteria.

Bukhara again makes the point. In the NBEMS 2024 report it had 299 candidates and 143 of them passed, a rate of 47.83% that beats most Russian universities outright. NMC alerted that same institute in April 2026. A good pass rate and an NMC alert can sit on the same university, and neither one is a verdict on the other.

While we are here: “WHO approved”

This one has a clean answer. The World Health Organization has never accredited medical schools, and it said so in plain words back when it still ran a directory of them: WHO “has no authority to grant any form of recognition or accreditation to schools of medicine or other training institutions. Such a procedure remains the exclusive prerogative of the national government concerned.”

That directory stopped being updated and its successor is the World Directory of Medical Schools, published by the World Federation for Medical Education and FAIMER. Neither is WHO. When a website says a university is WHO approved, it means the school is in that directory, which brings you back to the paragraph above.

How to check any university yourself

Three checks. None of them needs an agent, and together they take about twenty minutes.

Every NMC notice that names a foreign university

These are the notices we could find on nmc.org.in going back to 2021, read from the source PDFs. Two things to keep in mind. An alert is not a ban — NMC advises caution and warns that the criteria may not be met, and it does not de-recognise anything. And this list has no positive counterpart, so a university being absent from it means only that NMC has not warned about it.

What to ask before you pay

Send these to the university, in writing, and keep the reply. Any agent worth using will get them answered for you rather than telling you not to worry.

• ›How many months is the degree, and does the 12-month internship happen at your institution?
• ›Which years are taught in English, and what language are ward rounds and patient histories in?
• ›Does the degree let a graduate register and practise medicine in your country, on the same terms as your own citizens?
• ›Is the university's licence or accreditation current, and when was it last renewed?
• ›What is your FAIMER ID in the World Directory?

The last question is a quick honesty test. It takes any real university thirty seconds to answer, and you can check the answer yourself in the directory.