"Approach the university's international desk directly": why the Indian embassy in Minsk tells students to skip the agent entirely

Belarus has been a steady, unglamorous destination for medical students from India, Sri Lanka, Nigeria and elsewhere: state universities, Russian-influenced curricula, English-medium programmes, moderate fees. The Embassy of India in Minsk publishes guidance for those students, and its first instruction is blunt: apply by "directly approaching the International Desk of the concerned University without involving any intermediary/agent".

An embassy does not write that sentence for no reason. The embassy page itself does not name incidents, but the pattern it is responding to is well documented across destinations and is the most common form of impersonation in this field: individuals and companies presenting themselves as the "official representative" or "authorised admission partner" of a named university — in Belarus, most often the country's flagship, Belarusian State Medical University — and collecting "admission fees", "seat booking" payments and inflated first-year tuition on that basis. The university has an international desk that handles admissions itself; nothing an agent does on your behalf cannot be done by you, for free, by email.

The embassy guidance also restates the rule that catches many families: since May 2018, an Indian student needs a NEET qualification to be eligible to practise in India after a foreign medical degree. An agent who tells you NEET "is not needed for Belarus" is describing a degree you cannot use, and the embassy directs students to register on the MADAD grievance portal and to contact its consular officer with student-related complaints.

The practical sequence for Belarus — and it is the right sequence for any country with public medical universities — is: find the university's own website through your regulator's list or the World Directory, write to the international office named there, receive the invitation letter from a university email address, pay the university's account against its invoice, and use the embassy as your check whenever something an intermediary says cannot be confirmed by the university itself.

For students from Sri Lanka, Nigeria and other countries, the same applies with your own regulator: the Sri Lanka Medical Council and Nigeria's MDCN publish which foreign universities they recognise, and both have had to deal with graduates of programmes that agents described as "recognised" and regulators did not.