Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur in West Bengal has become the first IIT in India to introduce postgraduate medical degree programmes recognised by the National Medical Commission (NMC), offering 12 MD seats across six specialisations for the 2026-27 academic session, the institute announced on Thursday.
“The postgraduate medical programmes are supported by the in-house expanding clinical infrastructure of Dr. Shyama Prasad Mookerji Superspeciality Hospital – new Hospital of IIT Kharagpur, together with the South Eastern Railway Hospital, Kharagpur, under the established institutional partnership. “India’s first IIT is now taking a historic step towards shaping the future of medical education.
This arrangement provides the clinical training ecosystem for the approved postgraduate programmes, in accordance with the applicable NMC requirements,” Chakraborty said. IIT Kharagpur said in a statement that the programmes would provide opportunities for medical students to engage with research across areas such as AI-assisted clinical decision-making, advanced medical imaging, computational pathology, biomedical devices, molecular diagnostics, precision medicine and population health. Chakraborty said the institute’s objective was not limited to training specialist doctors but also included developing medical professionals capable of addressing healthcare challenges through research and technology. Our vision is not simply to train specialist doctors, but to create an ecosystem where clinical excellence meets engineering ingenuity, artificial intelligence and translational research,” he said. The institute also said that it has identified research-driven learning and international academic exposure as elements of the proposed academic environment.
The programmes will be offered at the institute’s Dr B C Roy Multi-Speciality Medical Research Centre, with admissions through the second round of NEET-PG 2026 counselling from November 10 to 23, according to the announcement. Fees of the PG medical course and stipends paid to students will be on the lines of AIIMS. The six specialisations are general medicine, radiology, physiology, pathology, community medicine and biochemistry, with two seats in each discipline. The programmes will be available for eligible candidates through the Medical Counselling Committee’s (MCC) online counselling process. The move marks the entry of an IIT into postgraduate medical education and is aimed at bringing clinical medicine closer to engineering, artificial intelligence (AI), biomedical sciences and translational research.
