Three Belize medical colleges, one Indian embassy report: the NMC advisory on harassment, missing infrastructure and fees that were never refunded

Belize is a small English-speaking country in Central America with a handful of private medical colleges that market themselves, mostly online, to students from India, Nigeria and elsewhere. In July 2025, India's National Medical Commission told Indian students not to enrol in three of them.

According to Careers360 and Medical Dialogues, the NMC's Undergraduate Medical Education Board issued the advisory on 21 July 2025 (following an earlier alert in May), naming Central America Health Sciences University, Columbus Central University and Washington University of Health and Sciences in Belize, along with the Chirchik branch of Tashkent State Medical University in Uzbekistan. The stated basis was information from the Embassy of India in Mexico — which covers Belize — and the Eurasia division of the Ministry of External Affairs.

The complaints, as reported, went beyond academic quality: inadequate or entirely absent infrastructure, substandard teaching and clinical training facilities, instances of harassment of Indian students, excessive fees, and refusal to refund fees. The NMC reminded students that the Foreign Medical Graduate Licentiate Regulations of 2021 set minimum conditions for a foreign degree to count in India, and that failure to meet them means ineligibility for medical registration — in other words, six years and the full fees for a degree that cannot be used at home. Breaking Belize News covered the advisory locally, noting the warning against the three Belizean institutions.

Several patterns overlap here. "Excessive fees" and "refusal to refund" are the fee-overcharge play. "Absent infrastructure" is the fake-campus play — a website, an office and clinical "affiliations" that do not add up to a medical school. And the fact that the alarm came from an embassy, not from the colleges' marketing or their agents, is the point: the people selling the seat had no incentive to mention any of it.

What to do with an advisory like this: treat any institution named by your regulator as closed to you, regardless of what an agent says about "new management" or "the issue being resolved". Check the regulator's alerts page before paying, and again before travelling. And if you are already enrolled somewhere that appears on such a list, contact your embassy — the students whose complaints produced this advisory did exactly that.