Final-year medical students who returned to India due to Covid-19 restrictions in China and the war in Ukraine will be allowed to appear for the Foreign Medical Graduate Exam, the National Medical Commission said in a notification on Thursday.
The Foreign Medical Graduate Exam is a screening test that foreign medical students need to pass in order to be able to practice the profession in India, according to The Indian Express.
The regulator said that the relaxation will apply to Indian students who had to leave foreign medical colleges prematurely and had to complete the remainder of their studies in India. The students also need to have received a certificate of completion of their course or their degree from their institutes on or before June 30.
Students who clear the Foreign Medical Graduate Exam will be required to undergo a Compulsory Rotating Medical Internship for two years, said the apex body regulating medical education in the country.
The internship will make up for the clinical training that the students could not physically attend while pursuing their undergraduate medical course, it added. The internship will also “familiarise them with the practice of medicine under Indian conditions”, it said.
Such students will get a registration only after they have completed the internship.
“The above relaxation granted to the foreign medical students is a one time measure and shall not be treated as a precedence in the future,” the National Medical Commission said.
The Supreme Court had on April 29 directed the regulatory body to frame a scheme within two months so that the medical students impacted by the war and the pandemic can complete their clinical training in Indian medical colleges, PTI reported.
Many Indian medical students had returned from China in January 2020 when Covid-19 began to spread there. However, they were unable to return to China to complete their studies due to the country’s stringent policies to contain the spread of the disease.
After the Russian military invaded Ukraine on February 24, the Indian government evacuated a large number of students trapped in the east European country.
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