Thousands of medical students who watched their careers stall — stranded in online classrooms during the pandemic while their peers trained in hospitals — now have a way forward in Himachal Pradesh. Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu announced on Tuesday, 28 July 2026 that his government has granted permission for eligible graduates of foreign medical colleges who studied via online classes due to COVID-19 to complete their mandatory one-year internship in the state. Posting in Hindi, CM Sukhu said: 'इस निर्णय से हजारों विद्यार्थियों को अपना करियर आगे बढ़ाने का अवसर मिलेगा' — 'This decision will give thousands of students the opportunity to advance their careers and give the right direction to their years of hard work.'

The pandemic debt these graduates carried

When COVID-19 shut borders and emptied campuses from 2020 onwards, a generation of Indian students enrolled in foreign MBBS programmes had no choice: attend online or lose the year. They attended online. But completing a medical degree through a screen created a compliance problem back home — India's medical licensing framework requires in-person, hands-on training, and regulators had to decide whether pandemic-era online study counted. The National Medical Commission (NMC), India's apex body for medical education regulation, addressed this in 2022, issuing guidelines that opened the door for eligible foreign medical graduates who had studied online during the pandemic to undertake their compulsory rotating internship in India. The Himachal Pradesh government's order now operationalises that opening at the state level, directing government hospitals to absorb these graduates into internship slots.

What the Himachal order actually unlocks

The state's move matters because internship placement is a state-administered function — central guidelines create eligibility, but it is the state government that must direct its hospitals to accept and train these graduates. Without a formal state-level order, eligible students could remain in limbo even after clearing the Foreign Medical Graduates Examination (FMGE) or the NExT screening. By formally permitting the one-year internship, Himachal Pradesh clears the final administrative hurdle for this cohort. The state's hospital network — including district and regional government hospitals — becomes the training ground that converts their foreign degrees into a licence to practise in India.

A wider pattern of states plugging the pandemic gap

Himachal Pradesh is not acting in isolation. Across India, states have periodically adopted central regulatory relaxations to reintegrate foreign-trained doctors disrupted by the pandemic, driven partly by a persistent shortage of licensed practitioners in public health systems. Each such state order adds a few hundred — sometimes a few thousand — doctors-in-training to a pipeline that India's rural and semi-urban hospitals urgently need. The precise number of graduates who will benefit in Himachal Pradesh has not been officially disclosed. What to watch next: the pace of internship slot allocation in state hospitals and whether the NMC issues any fresh eligibility or examination clarifications that could affect this cohort's path to full registration.