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Financial strain mounts for Indian families seeking postgraduate medical seats
Financial strain mounts for Indian families seeking postgraduate medical seats Premium
As November ends, families and students in India aspiring for a seat in the postgraduate medical education system are recuperating with the financial strain. This year's NEET-PG exam earlier scheduled for June 15, 2025, was postponed by the National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences (NBEMS) to August 3, 2025. After this delay, counselling backlogs have stretched for months. Parents recount the immediate shock at discovering that if they miss out on a government seat, institutes can demand anywhere from ₹20 lakh to over ₹2.5 crore annually for a management or NRI seat, with top specialties costing even more.
The fee structure leaves families drowning in debt, with some postponing essential needs just to keep aspiring doctors in the race. Worse, there is no guaranteed return on this investment: job security remains elusive, recoveries can take a decade or longer, and students who enter the system already as MBBS doctors are forced into making heartbreaking sacrifices.
The NEET-PG fees are regulated by the Supreme Court, which mandates pre-counseling fee disclosure, and the National Medical Commission (NMC), which is establishing a centralised fee regulation framework. Regulations, however, are not uniform across States. Each State has its own fee structures, reservation policies, and regulations for their State-quota seats, though the Supreme Court is pushing for more transparency and accountability overall.
Apart from State-to-State differences in fees, the costs soar up significantly with private and deemed universities. There are different seat categories ranging from subsidised government seats to ‘queue' and open seats. The highly subsidised seat starts from ₹ 2.5 lakh to ₹ 3 lakh, NRI seats starts from ₹ 2.5 crore and this goes up to ₹ 7 crore in some states.
For students within government institutions, the struggle takes a different form. A 32-year-old Orthopedic doctor from a government medical college in Kolkata explained that attempts, gap years, and counselling delays have become a routine burden.
Doctors from semi-government colleges of Hazaribagh talk about the drastic lifestyle changes families make after investing the largest chunk of their money for fees and other student expenses. A PG student who paid for a private seat said the tuition fee of ₹2.5 lakh per year was only the beginning. Hostel charges, deposits, exam fees, and miscellaneous add-ons pushed the cost far higher. “My parents cut down every expense possible. Even medical treatments were postponed,” she recalled. Counselling delays pushed her into multiple attempts, and each year added more financial and emotional strain. “PG education today feels less like a right and more like a race with unequal starting points”, she said.
A surgeon who completed a high-fee PG program five years ago described the aftermath as “an ongoing process of recovery.” Despite finishing his MS in Surgery, he has not been able to recover the investment. His first job paid just ₹25,000 a month, forcing him to take multiple shifts across districts. “I travelled to Bardhaman to do surgeries just to survive,” he said. His family mortgaged their house, and the emotional toll persists. “Some days, I regret choosing this field, it's thankless, high-risk, and one mistake can destroy your life.”
Experts say the strain is structural, not personal. Radiologist Dr. Ankush Bansal observed that recovering the investment depends on the field and on practicing ethically, which slows earnings even further. He acknowledges that PG degrees open doors and builds long-term credibility but warns that the current system overburdens families. As someone who trained in a subsidised government institution 15 years ago, he considers today's costs “unimaginable.”
The biggest crisis, Dr. Bansal argues lies in the mismatch between MBBS and PG seat expansion and the inability of rural hospitals to utilise PG-trained doctors meaningfully. For example, in many States in southern India, the number of UG seats is comparatively on a higher side in comparison to PG seats, creating a bottleneck. “Unless PG capacity and infrastructure improve, students will continue to feel trapped”, he said.
In Goa, the picture is somewhat different. Dr. Sandeep Sardessai of Goa Medical College explains that the State benefits from a favorable 140 PG seats for 100 UG seats, ensuring relatively smoother admissions. He stresses the need for ethical training and warns that as long as private players dominate, fees will remain steep. Government colleges, he says, maintain rational fee structures, but many States do not share this advantage.
A senior official from Goa's State counselling authority said the delays in NEET-PG counselling were entirely dependent on schedules released by the National Medical Commission in New Delhi. The official pointed out that Goa's lack of private colleges shields students from the high-priced NRI seats and management quotas seen in other states. However, they declined to comment on national bottlenecks or infrastructure gaps, citing protocol.
A practicing doctor on the condition of anonymity said that to change things for better the government facilitates increase in PG seat capacity to match MBBS passouts and also sets benchmarks by offering remunerative pay. He says it helps cap pricing in private institutions, like in the case of Kerala which has a more moderate pricing system.
He says the government allows corporates to leverage huge but underinvested Government district level hospitals to put up more seats for UG/ PG. “It also ensures that good stipends are paid, though they are in the tens of thousands while fees are in lakhs or crores”, he says.
(Nibedita Sen is an independent journalist specialising in defence, with over 15 years of experience covering diverse topics like rural India, healthcare, education, and women's issues.)
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Published - November 26, 2025 07:18 pm IST
education / medical colleges / medical education / medical specialisation / students
Source: The Hindu
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