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Only MBBS and BDS holders may write 'Dr': Bangladesh High Court's March 2025 ruling on section 29 of the BMDC Act, and up to three years' jail for misuse
In Bangladesh the Bangladesh Medical and Dental Council (BMDC) registers doctors under the BMDC Act 2010. Section 29 bars a registered practitioner from using any name or description suggesting a qualification they do not hold, with up to three years' imprisonment, a fine of Tk 100,000 or both. For more than a decade MBBS and BDS graduates and holders of the Diploma in Medical Faculty (DMF), who work as sub-assistant community medical officers, had fought over who may write 'Dr'. In March 2025 the High Court settled it.
According to Prothom Alo and bdnews24 (12 March 2025), a bench of Justice Razik-Al-Jalil and Justice Shathika Hossain ruled on Wednesday 12 March, on two writ petitions heard together, that no one may use 'Doctor' before their name without an MBBS or BDS degree. The first petition, filed in 2013 by Md Shamsul Huda, then convener of the Bangladesh Diploma Medical Association, argued that the Act discriminated against DMF holders; bdnews24 noted that its first hearing was on 30 April 2013 and that the case then stalled until February 2025. The second, filed in 2024 by the association's president and secretary, challenged section 29 itself, and on 25 November 2024 the court had asked why the section should not be declared unconstitutional. The Daily Star reported that the court directed the respondents, among them the health and law secretaries and the BMDC's president and registrar, to give DMF holders an appropriate prefix within six months. Deputy Attorney General AFM Saiful Karim told the paper that no one except MBBS or BDS degree holders can use 'Dr'.
The court said people who had used the title before the ruling would not be penalised, but anyone using it afterwards would face legal action. bdnews24 reported that the verdict came during a countrywide work stoppage by doctors and medical students over five demands, one of them restricting the title, while Medical Assistant Training School students had been protesting for the right to use it. The Daily Star reported that outdoor services at Dhaka Medical College Hospital were suspended that morning.
Prothom Alo reported in November 2024 that the BMDC had 134,568 registered physicians and 14,323 dentists but about 36,000 physicians practising without renewed registration, and could not say how many had registered on fake documents or practised with no registration at all.
For a patient, the prefix is now a legal claim: anyone writing 'Dr' in Bangladesh is asserting an MBBS or BDS, and the BMDC's online register shows whether the registration exists and is current. For students, check the register, not the signboard, before choosing a mentor, clinic or college hospital; a degree from an unrecognised institution will never carry the title however it is printed.
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