PMDC to recover Rs. 200m from medical universities

ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PMDC) has recognized a financial mismanagement of over Rs. 200 million and is currently designing a strategy to retrieve the amount from universities that instituted postgraduate programmes in the past two years, Dawn has learned.

As per council officials, the problem was revealed in August 2025 when a university from Karachi sought the recognition of 20 postgraduate courses. While verifying, Deputy Registrar Dr. Habibullah observed that the university had not paid the Comprehensive Inspection Fee (CIF) of Rs. 800,000 per course.

More probes confirmed that no university had paid the CIF during the last two years, even after getting the approval for their courses.

Documents, as reported by Dawn, indicate other charges—secretariat charges, application charges, and inspector charges—were charged, but CIF was always left out. It has been estimated that the absence costs the regulator more than Rs. 200 million.

A PMDC senior official was quoted by Dawn as saying that the issue would be forwarded to the Postgraduate Medical Education Committee (PMEC) to assess. The official also said that the council would recover the total arrears and deposit them in the PMDC accounts.

PMDC, which oversees medical and dental colleges and accredits postgraduate programmes under the PMDC Act, has come under fire for the lapse with demands for accountability of officials who facilitated the lapse during the periods of several registrars.