NMC Monthly ATR: How to File It Without a War Room

By Dr. Chandra Sekhar Bondugula — Founder, Mynaa AI
A practical walkthrough for the medical college Dean and Registrar who must, from the seventh of every month, file the National Medical Commission’s ten-section Action Taken Report on student mental health — without losing a weekend.

What changed in 2026

In early 2026 the National Medical Commission issued Public Notice CDN-11011/1/2026 requiring every recognised medical college and deemed-to-be university medical institution in India to file a monthly Action Taken Report (ATR) on student mental health. The ATR is due on the seventh working day of each following month. Non-filing is treated as a deficiency under the NMC’s minimum standards regulations and can affect annual renewal of recognition.

The notice is short. The work it implies is not. The ten sections, taken together, ask a medical college to produce, every month, the kind of operational dataset that most institutions have never collected systematically — counsellor session counts, training attendance, risk-screening aggregates, referral pathways, incident logs, parent-engagement metrics, physical-safety remediation, residency-specific data, helpline volumes, and a Dean’s narrative summary.

I have watched several good medical colleges spend the first weekend of each month in what one Registrar described to me as “a small war room.” Three people, two laptops, four spreadsheets, one anxious phone call to the warden, and a document that goes out at 11.47 p.m. on the seventh. This article exists so that does not have to happen at your college.

What the NMC actually wants

Before we get to the ten sections, a word on intent. The NMC is not asking for a literary essay. It is asking for evidence that:

The Supreme Court’s 2025 guidelines on student mental health are being implemented in the medical-college context, where the academic load is high and the suicide rates have, historically, been higher than in the general student population.
The college has a named Dean of Student Welfare or equivalent who owns this work month after month.
The data being reported is real, dated, and would survive an inspection.

Once you internalise this, the ATR stops being a thirty-page imagination exercise and becomes a ten-section operational dashboard. You are not writing a report. You are reading out a dashboard that already exists.

The ten sections, in plain English

Section 1 — Institutional declaration and Nodal Officer

One page. The Dean’s declaration that the college is in compliance with NMC norms, the name and contact of the Mental Health Nodal Officer (typically the Dean of Student Welfare or Chief Medical Officer), the date of the latest Internal Mental Health Committee meeting, and the signature of the Dean.

How often it changes: rarely. Set it up once, refresh the meeting date and signature each month.

Section 2 — Counsellor cover and student-to-counsellor ratio

Total student enrolment (UG, PG, super-speciality, interns — reported separately). Number of qualified counsellors and psychiatrists on the roll, with RCI / NMC registration numbers. Visiting empanelled professionals. Current student-to-counsellor ratio. Out-of-hours cover arrangement.

Common pitfall: reporting interns as “not students” to flatter the ratio. The NMC, in the same notice, has made it clear that interns are students for the purposes of this report.

Section 3 — Counselling sessions conducted (anonymised)

Monthly counts: total sessions, sessions by counsellor type (psychologist, psychiatrist, peer mentor), sessions by student category (UG / PG / intern), modality (in-person / tele / asynchronous). No names. Ever. Aggregate numbers only.

Two derived numbers the NMC will look at: average sessions per counsellor per week (a workload signal), and percentage of student body that accessed services this month (an accessibility signal).

Section 4 — Standardised screening

Number of students screened, by instrument: PHQ-9, GAD-7, DASS-21, C-SSRS. Aggregate distributions in clinical bands (minimal / mild / moderate / moderately severe / severe). Number flagged for follow-up. Number who completed follow-up within seven days.

The NMC notice does not specify which instruments to use, but the medical-education context makes the PHQ-9 + GAD-7 + C-SSRS triad the defensible standard. If you use anything else, justify it in a footnote.

Section 5 — Training and capacity-building

Mandatory biannual training under SC Guideline VI is enforced here. Report: training sessions held this month, faculty / warden / staff attendance percentage, content covered (Psychological First Aid, QPR, NIMHANS sensitisation modules), assessment scores (if applicable), and the next scheduled session.

Non-attendance must be flagged. The NMC has indicated, in correspondence with several colleges, that colleges showing 100% attendance every month are being asked for raw attendance sheets. Honesty is cheaper.

Section 6 — Internal Committee and incident reporting

Anti-ragging, harassment and mental-health grievances received this month. Acknowledgement within 24 hours: yes / no count. Action initiated within 72 hours: yes / no count. Closure within 15 days: yes / no count. Open cases carried over from previous month.

Critical: any incident of self-harm, attempted suicide or death by suicide must be reported in this section in de-identified form with date, modality of intervention and current status. Suppression of such events is the single most damaging failure mode in NMC reviews. Report them, document the response, and let the response speak.

Section 7 — Parent and family engagement

Parent sensitisation programmes conducted this month (under SC Guideline IX). Number of parents enrolled. Module completion percentage. Crisis communications to parents (count, not content). Parent grievances received and resolution status.

Section 8 — Physical safety and campus infrastructure

The most uncomfortable section to write and the one the NMC reads first if there has been an incident anywhere in the country that month. Status of:

Tamper-proof ceiling-fan rods in hostels (rooms completed / total rooms)
Restricted rooftop access (yes / no per block)
Window-grille audit in bathrooms (completed / pending)
24/7 medical-room functionality with psychiatric coverage
MoU with a hospital with a psychiatry department within one kilometre (yes / no, MoU date)

Progress in this section is acceptable. Stagnation across three consecutive months is not.

Section 9 — Postgraduate residents

The NMC has, with reason, asked colleges to report residents separately. PG and super-speciality residents have a workload and a power dynamic that places them at distinct risk. Report: residents enrolled, residents screened, residents accessing counselling, residents’ duty-hour compliance with the latest NMC residents’ norms, complaints related to harassment or excessive duty hours, and resolution status.

If you fill this section honestly for six months, your college will, by month seven, have a clearer picture of resident mental health than most teaching hospitals in the country have ever had.

Section 10 — Dean’s narrative and forward plan

One to two pages, signed by the Dean. What worked this month. What did not. What is planned for next month. Specific gaps the college is acknowledging, and the timeline to close them. This is the only section where prose is welcome. Keep it short and direct. NMC reviewers, in my experience, value a Dean who names a problem and dates the fix far more than one who pretends there is no problem.

The data architecture — what to collect, where to keep it

Most of the ATR’s pain comes not from the format but from the data not existing in the right shape on the seventh of the month. Solve that problem once. Set up:

A single counsellor session log — date, counsellor ID, student category (UG / PG / intern), modality, duration, follow-up flag. No name. No identifier traceable to a name except inside the counsellor’s clinical file.
A screening register — instrument, date administered, anonymised student code, band, follow-up status, follow-up date. Closed-loop on every flagged case.
A training attendance ledger — date, module, attendees by role, signed attendance sheets archived.
An incident log — date received, category, severity, acknowledgement timestamp, action timestamp, closure timestamp, current status. SLA breaches highlighted.
A physical-safety remediation tracker — block, room range, item, status, completion date, photograph reference.
A helpline and after-hours log — date, time, route (Tele-MANAS / iCall / institutional number / Mynaa), outcome category.

If these six logs are clean and up-to-date on the first of the month, the ATR writes itself in two hours on the seventh. If they are not, the ATR cannot be written honestly at all.

A monthly cadence that works

Last working day of the month

The Nodal Officer freezes the data for the month. No backdated entries after this. The six logs are exported and timestamped.

First working day of the new month

The Nodal Officer drafts Sections 2, 3, 4 and 7 directly from the frozen exports. These are arithmetic, not narrative.

Second working day

The Internal Committee’s monthly sub-meeting reviews Section 6 (incidents) and Section 9 (residents). The Committee’s observations are minuted and feed Section 10.

Third working day

The Estate Officer or designated officer signs off on Section 8 with the physical-safety tracker as evidence. Photographs are filed alongside.

Fourth working day

The Nodal Officer drafts Section 10 and circulates the entire ATR to the Dean for review.

Fifth and sixth working days

The Dean reviews, edits Section 10, and signs.

Seventh working day

The Registrar files the ATR on the NMC portal before 5 p.m. The signed PDF and the underlying data exports are archived in the institutional compliance folder with a date-stamped filename: ATR_[CollegeCode]_[YYYYMM].pdf.

No weekend. No war room. No 11.47 p.m. submission.

The five mistakes I see most often

1. The Dean writes the ATR

The Dean signs the ATR. The Dean does not write it. If the Dean is drafting Section 3 from spreadsheets at 9 p.m., your college does not have a Nodal Officer in any meaningful sense. Fix that first.

2. Names appear in anonymised data

I have read ATRs that proudly anonymise Section 3 and then, in Section 6, name a student by their roll number and class. The NMC and any inspecting authority will read both. The DPDP Act 2023 also reads both. If the file is going outside the institution, names and traceable identifiers do not leave the clinical file.

3. The college reports 100% on everything

100% training attendance in a 240-faculty college every month for six months is not credible. The NMC has begun asking for the raw sheets. A truthful 86% with a one-line note on the absent faculty members’ rescheduled session is far stronger than a fabricated 100%.

4. Section 8 is left vague

“Physical safety measures are being implemented as per SC Guideline XIV” is not a report. It is a sentence. The NMC wants block-by-block, room-range-by-room-range numbers. Vagueness here is the section that ages worst in the event of an inspection.

5. Section 9 is treated as an afterthought

The postgraduate section is, in my view, the most important in the ATR. PG residents are the population in your college with the highest acute distress prevalence and the lowest help-seeking rate. A serious Section 9 takes longer to fill than Section 3. If your Section 9 is shorter than your Section 3, look again.

What if you have nothing to report?

I am sometimes asked, by a Dean of a newly-recognised medical college, “Dr. Bondugula, what do I file in month one when none of this is in place?”

You file the truth. Section 1 with your name. Section 2 with your current ratio, however unflattering. Sections 3 and 4 with zeros or near-zeros and a footnote on the planned start date for the screening programme. Section 5 with the scheduled training date. Section 6 with any open ragging or grievance cases. Section 7 with the planned parent-orientation date. Section 8 with the audit-in-progress note and the targeted completion date. Section 9 with your residents’ current duty-hour position. Section 10 as a one-page plan signed by the Dean.

An honest first ATR is welcomed by the NMC. A dishonest first ATR is what causes problems six months later when month two does not match month one and the inspector notices.

The Supreme Court connection

The NMC ATR is, in practice, the operational implementation of the Supreme Court’s 2025 guidelines in the medical-college context. Sections 2 and 3 satisfy Guidelines II and III. Section 4 supports Guideline X. Section 5 satisfies Guideline VI. Section 6 satisfies Guideline VIII. Section 7 satisfies Guideline IX. Section 8 satisfies Guideline XIV. Section 9 is the NMC’s additional layer on top of the SC guidelines, addressing the resident-specific risk.

If your college has built the thirty-day SC compliance file I have described in a separate post, ninety per cent of the data the NMC ATR needs already exists. The ATR becomes a monthly read-out of that file, not a fresh research project.

Where Mynaa fits in

Everything I have written above is what I would do whether Mynaa existed or not. Several medical colleges file their ATR manually every month, with discipline and good data, and the NMC accepts it. I have seen it done well.

What we have built into Mynaa, because we work mainly with medical colleges, is the auto-generation of the ten-section ATR from the data the platform is already collecting in the normal course of the month:

The counsellor session log feeds Section 3 directly
The standardised screening engine (PHQ-9, GAD-7, DASS-21, C-SSRS) feeds Section 4
The training-attendance ledger with sign-off blocking feeds Section 5
The Internal Committee workflow with SLA timers feeds Section 6
The parent micro-learning track feeds Section 7
The physical-safety request register feeds Section 8
The PG-resident module feeds Section 9
The Dean’s narrative is a one-screen editor in Section 10, prefilled with the month’s data trends

On the seventh of the month, the Registrar clicks one button. The PDF is generated, the underlying data exports are zipped alongside, and the file is ready to upload to the NMC portal. A process that used to take a war room takes one cup of coffee.

This is not magic. It is what happens when you collect the right data, in the right shape, on the day it is generated — instead of trying to reconstruct it from spreadsheets on the sixth of the next month.

A small ask

If you are a Dean, Registrar or Nodal Officer of a medical college and you would like the editable Word version of the ten-section ATR template, with the data-architecture worksheet and the monthly cadence calendar, write to me at founder@mynaa.ai. I will send it without a sales pitch and without an account being created. Use it freely.

Medical education in India is hard enough on the students. The institutions that train them should not have to spend a weekend a month fighting a spreadsheet to prove they care.

— Dr. Chandra Sekhar Bondugula
Founder, Mynaa AI