MD, MS and DNB thesis mentorship across IndiaMD, MS and DNB thesis mentorship across India

Your thesis is not a private arrangement between you and your guide. It is a requirement of the degree itself: the Post Graduate Medical Education Regulations, 2023 keep the thesis compulsory for every broad and super-specialty postgraduate and have it assessed inside the practical and viva examination^[1].

If you are a DNB or DrNB trainee, it is NBEMS that sets your calendar rather than your department. The protocol, with ethics committee approval, goes up within 180 days of joining; data collection closes by 24 months; the thesis itself is due at 26 months, inside an 80-page limit^[2]. When you onboard we load those dates into your tracker from your joining date, so each one carries a countdown rather than a reminder you have to set yourself.

Two further instruments run alongside. Most health universities apply the UGC convention that similarity below 10% is acceptable^[3], and under the ICMR national guidelines ethics committee approval precedes data collection — which is why we will not begin analysis on a dataset collected before approval was granted^[5].

Where your own university ordinance is stricter than any of this, the ordinance wins. MUHS, KUHS, RGUHS, NTRUHS, TNMGRMU, BFUHS, DMER and the other state universities each publish their own template, and that template is what we format to. You remain the sole author throughout; we claim no authorship or co-authorship, and authorship of any paper that follows is decided by the ICMJE contribution criteria^[4].