NEW DELHI: The government’s ambitious National Medical Register (NMR), launched last year with the aim of creating a centralised and dynamic database of modern medicine practitioners in the country, has failed to take off. Less than a year after it was made mandatory, the Union Health Ministry has quietly rolled back the requirement, declaring registration as voluntary.The NMR portal, launched on August 23, 2024, by Union health minister J P Nadda, was billed as a big leap to ensure transparency and verification in India’s medical workforce.This paper on May 1 was the first to report that the NMR portal was largely unsuccessful in registering modern medicine practitioners. Less than one per cent of doctors had enrolled on the platform by May. In a written reply to a question in the Lok Sabha by Samajwadi Party MP Aditya Yadav, MoS (Health) Anupriya Patel confirmed on August 8 that NMR registration was no longer mandatory. “The application for issuance of NMR is voluntary,” she stated in Parliament.Yadav had posed his question based on a report published in this newspaper earlier this year, which highlighted the poor response to the registration drive.As per an RTI reply received by Kerala-based ophthalmologist and RTI activist Dr K V Babu, only 996 doctors had registered on the NMR portal as of August 8 — of over 13 lakh doctors in India.“This move is welcome. But it does not absolve National Medical Commission (NMC) of its failure,” Dr Babu said.
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