MBBS internship in India is a 12-month Compulsory Rotating Medical Internship, and the year only counts if you work it on purpose. You get 15 days of leave, you may not practise independently, and your logbook decides whether the year is finished. The method below turns each posting into cases, procedures, and notes you can actually use later.
The internship in one page
The NMC Compulsory Rotating Medical Internship, or CRMI, runs for a minimum of 12 months under the CRMI Regulations 2021, and you must finish it within 2 years of passing Final MBBS, FMGE, or NExT Step-1. Indian graduates do the whole internship in the institution where they did MBBS. Foreign medical graduates do it in NMC-approved hospitals, with 43,250 FMG CRMI slots listed for 2026-27. You get a maximum of 15 days of leave across the whole year, with prior permission, and interns may not practise independently.
Two 2026 updates matter if you are a foreign graduate. An NMC circular dated 10 March 2026 reserves 7.5% of intern intake in established colleges for FMGs, and the window to finish CRMI in a non-teaching hospital runs to May 2028. After the mandatory rotations comes an elective, listed as 15 days in one source and 4 weeks in another, so check your own college notice. Named options include Radio-Diagnosis, Forensic Medicine, Blood Bank, Psychiatry, Dermatology, and TB and Respiratory Medicine.
The postings, posting by posting
The mandatory exclusive postings add up to 48 weeks under the NMC Schedule. Community Medicine runs 12 weeks, the longest posting, including 3 weeks each in Medicine, Surgery, and Obstetrics and Gynaecology at a district hospital, plus a stay at a community centre. General Medicine runs 6 weeks, General Surgery 6 weeks, and Obstetrics and Gynaecology 7 weeks. Paediatrics runs 3 weeks in the schedule summary, though some summaries say 1 month, so treat that as a point to check against Schedule I of the Gazette. Psychiatry runs 2 weeks, Anaesthesiology and Critical Care 2 weeks, and Orthopaedics with Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation 2 weeks. Forensic Medicine runs 1 week. Casualty and Emergency, Ophthalmology, ENT, Dermatology, and other short postings fill out the year, then the electives follow.
Do not read that table as a clean month-by-month calendar from the NMC, because sources summarise Schedule I differently, in weeks in some places and months in others, and your college sets its own rotation order.
| Posting | Duration | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Community Medicine | 12 weeks | Field work, national programmes, and how care reaches a village |
| General Medicine | 6 weeks | Ward work, OPD, emergency, and HDU and ICU exposure |
| General Surgery | 6 weeks | Pre-op and post-op care, dressings, and theatre exposure |
| Obstetrics and Gynaecology | 7 weeks | Labour room, antenatal care, and common gynaecology cases |
| Paediatrics | 3 weeks (some summaries say 1 month) | Newborn care, immunisation, and common childhood illness |
| Psychiatry | 2 weeks | History taking, mental state examination, and counselling |
| Anaesthesiology and Critical Care | 2 weeks | Airway basics, monitoring, and what a sick patient looks like |
| Orthopaedics with PMR | 2 weeks | Fracture care, plaster basics, and rehabilitation |
| Forensic Medicine | 1 week | Medico-legal cases, certificates, and court basics |
What each posting should teach you
Medicine teaches you to take a full history, build a differential, and manage a ward. Go in wanting to present one case a day to your senior, and to write the plan yourself before you ask for it. Surgery teaches you the patient around the operation: consent, pre-op checks, wound care, and post-op complications. Ask to assist early, even if you only hold a retractor, because theatre time is the one thing you cannot revise from a book.
Obstetrics and Gynaecology teaches you the labour room, and the only way to learn it is to be there at night. Paediatrics teaches you to examine a child who cannot tell you what hurts. Community Medicine shows you the part no ward shows: how a programme works in a village and why patients do not come back. The short postings teach you the referral question: what you can handle and how fast to send the patient on.
Stipend: what interns actually get paid
There is no national stipend rate, and the range is wide enough to change your plans. On the NMC list of college reports from April 2024 to February 2026, government colleges pay from about ₹12,000 a month in Uttar Pradesh, including KGMU Lucknow, and in Jammu and Kashmir, up to ₹43,099 at Raiganj in West Bengal. Maulana Azad Medical College Delhi pays ₹34,310. West Bengal and Odisha pay ₹40,000 and above.
The low end is the problem. About 90 of 210 private and trust colleges reporting paid under ₹10,000 a month, and 60 of 555 colleges evaluated paid no stipend at all. An RTI response dated 6 July 2026 says the NMC has not yet begun the formal CRMI amendment process for stipend parity. Foreign graduates are entitled to a stipend on par with Indian graduates under a Supreme Court order. Colleges must publish their stipend on their website, updated by the 5th of every month under an NMC notice dated 16 April 2024, so check your own college site for the current figure.
The logbook system: 15 minutes a day
The Mentor and Intern Assessment Form is the assessment record for your internship, and completion to your college and university satisfaction is needed for your MBBS degree and permanent registration. The system that works is a daily 15-minute habit, not an end-of-posting rush. Write the entry the same day, while the case is still fresh.
Use one fixed template for every posting. First, 3 cases written fully, from history and examination through differential to plan. Second, procedures listed as observed, assisted, or done, with the supervision level noted. Third, one note a week on what you got wrong, with what you would do next time. Fourth, the logbook entry itself, signed the same day.
Cases: how to pick and write three per posting
Pick one common case, one case you got wrong or nearly missed, and one case that taught you a procedure or a decision. Write the history in the patient words where it matters, the examination findings you actually found, the differential with one line of reasoning for each option, the investigations and why you ordered them, and the plan with the follow-up. A case written this way is a revision note, a viva answer, and a logbook entry at once.
Do not write ten cases badly. Three written fully beat ten written as one-line entries, because the point is the reasoning, not the count. Read each finished case once a week later and mark what you would change. For the exam prep that follows internship, see NExT vs NEET PG 2026 and whether NExT is happening.
Procedures: the observe, assist, do ladder
For every procedure, note where you stand on the ladder: observed, assisted, or done under supervision. Ask for the next rung on purpose. If you observed IV cannulation ten times, ask to do the next one with supervision. If you assisted in a dressing change, ask to do the next one while someone watches.
Keep a simple list: the procedure, the date, the patient type without any identifying detail, and the supervision level. Never do a procedure alone that you have not been signed off for. The rule is firm: interns may not practise independently, and a short cut here can end a career before it starts. For a comparison of the PG prep platforms many interns use next, read Marrow vs PrepLadder 2026.
AI for case write-ups: draft, quiz, then verify everything
AI can help with the writing, if you use it the right way. Give it your own notes and ask it to structure a draft: history, examination, investigations, differential with reasoning, and management. Then ask it to quiz you on the differential, one question at a time, and to point out the option you dismissed too fast.
Verify every dose, investigation cut-off, and guideline against a textbook before anything enters your logbook. A 2024 analysis found ChatGPT-4 hallucinated 28.6% of its references, so a confident-sounding dose in a draft may simply be wrong. Never paste identifiable patient data into a consumer chatbot, because there is no consent and no data agreement behind it. No India-specific AI case write-up tool was found while researching this post, so the method above uses a general chatbot plus your textbook, not a medical writing tool. Ominsol fits the same pattern: its textbook chat can check a fact against your own book with a citation, and its flashcards and MCQs keep the topics from each posting on revision. Use the tool to check and test, and keep the judgement in your own hands.
One last note: this post is general information, not medical advice. Check your university notice and NMC rules for your own session before you plan around any posting length or stipend figure given here.
The bottom line on MBBS internship in India
MBBS internship in India gives you 12 months, 15 days of leave, and a logbook that decides whether the year counts. Use each posting with a fixed template: 3 cases written fully, procedures tracked on the observe, assist, do ladder, one note a week on what you got wrong, and a logbook entry the same day. Stipends run from about ₹12,000 to ₹43,099 a month on the NMC list, with no national rate, so check your own college site. Use AI to draft and quiz, verify every dose in a textbook, and keep patient data out of chatbots entirely.