India’s apex medical regulatory authority on Thursday announced a nationwide survey to determine what stipends medical interns and postgraduate students receive in private, self-financed medical colleges amid concerns that many are denied or receive paltry amounts.

The National Medical Commission (NMC) has urged undergraduate and postgraduate students in private self-financed medical colleges across India to respond to the survey through a Google form. It has assured the students their identity will not be disclosed to anyone.

The NMC said it had initiated the survey under directions of the National Human Rights Commission, which had received complaints earlier from medical students about inadequate stipends. The NMC has sought students’ responses by May 7.

A Kerala-based doctor who has since 2019 campaigned for central government action to ensure that all private medical colleges pay stipends on par with central and state government medical colleges said the proposed survey had exposed the NMC’s inaction.

“The survey being conducted shows the NMC’s indifference to the stipend situation in private colleges until now,” said K.V. Babu, an ophthalmologist based in Kannur.

Babu said it had been widely known that in some private colleges, the stipends for interns were “arbitrary or paltry” and some did not pay stipends at all.

A student in a private college near Mangalore, Karnataka, who completed the MBBS coursework in April 2022 and has just completed a year-long internship said none of the students in his college had received any stipend over the past year.

“There are two other private medical colleges close to ours — we’ve heard the interns in one received Rs 12,000 per month, and Rs 30,000 per month in the other,” the intern told The Telegraph.

Another student in a private medical college in Bangalore said the college had paid Rs 10,000 per month as internship to interns in the current batch.

The stipend amounts in government colleges vary across states and institutions. For MBBS interns, they range from Rs 10,000 to Rs 30,000. For postgraduate students and residents, stipend amounts in government colleges range from Rs 50,000 to Rs 100,000, said Meet Ghonia, a respiratory medicine specialist in New Delhi. “Some colleges don’t pay a single rupee, others pay very little — even the NMC has no data on this.”

The Board of Governors of the Medical Council of India — the body that was replaced by the NMC — had in 2019 proposed through a public notice that private medical colleges should pay the same stipends as government colleges. But, Babu said, the board did not implement the proposal.