The health minister arrived at Murshidabad Medical College without warning and found an intern from a dental college doing an MBBS intern’s job. Officials say the trade is organised and runs on WhatsApp, with slots posted like classifieds: evening casualty from 3 pm, night casualty from 10 pm to 8 am, price underneath. One group, named Internship Replacement, has more than 255 members. At those rates a single ten-hour night in the ER changes hands for ₹2,000 to ₹6,000.

An intern at R G Kar described the version that goes further. If a posting does not interest you, you do not buy one shift, you buy the whole rotation, and that runs to ₹30,000 out of a ₹45,000 stipend. What makes anyone pay sits on the other side: 70 to 90 hours a week, single duties from six hours to twenty-four, every missed hour still owed back. Most who pay are buying study time for the MD and MS entrance. And the stand-ins are not always doctors in training. Ayurveda students and friends with no medical training have also covered.

A paediatrician in Chhindwara was arrested on 5 October 2025 after the block medical officer complained that he kept prescribing Coldrif while children who had taken it were dying. The first death was reported on 4 September. Twenty-six children, most aged two to four, developed acute kidney injury and were referred to Nagpur, where several died. Testing found diethylene glycol in the syrup at up to 46.28% weight by volume against a permitted 0.1%, the solvent used in brake fluid and antifreeze.

His counsel ran the obvious defence: he prescribed the syrup, he did not make it, it was licensed and not banned when he wrote it, and Jacob Mathew v State of Punjab shields a doctor from prosecution without expert opinion. The bench, led by the Chief Justice, was unmoved. Charges were framed only recently, the stockist is his relative, and the prosecution says he took a 10% commission on every bottle sold through the pharmacy beside his clinic. A CDSCO circular of December 2023 had already barred fixed-dose combination cough syrups for children under four.

Bail refused. He can apply again in a year. And if the prosecution clears one bar, the court said, the charge carries life imprisonment.

Read the hearing report →

A man with two mechanical valves came into a Delhi cardiac unit with his aortic prosthesis jammed by thrombus and a mean gradient of 61 to 66 mmHg. Streptokinase opened the valve. Next day his right side was not moving and he could not speak, and a left middle cerebral artery territory infarct was documented. An expert board at G.B. Pant, the Delhi Medical Council and the Medical Council of India on appeal all found no negligence in the treatment, and the commission accepted every word of it.

Then it asked who took him to the next hospital. The family says they were told no equipped ambulance was free and the doctor was busy, so they hired one and travelled with nobody medical on board. The hospital’s defence says nothing about the ambulance at all. Rs 15,00,000 for mental agony, Rs 50,000 in costs, nothing against the Rs 50 lakh claimed for lost earning, eleven years on. The treating doctor, ex parte since 2016, walked away carrying nothing.

What the order never explains, and the three fixes worth making this week →

It filled 198 seats in round one of July. Rank 1 took General Medicine; the last seat went to rank 38,343 in Pharmacology, and 112 of the 198 went past rank 1,000. For an unreserved candidate the window is narrow: General Medicine closed at 3, Radiology at 4, and by 819 every unreserved clinical seat was gone. Reserved seats ran deeper, SC General Medicine closing at 580 and ST at 1,350. Its own graduates took 36 seats on institutional preference, the deepest at 37,717.

Every branch and every category, January and July, and which two branches to stop listing →

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