When Manish Kumar walked into Government Medical College Bettiah, Bihar, in 2020, it was meant to be the culmination of three years of grueling NEET prep. Instead, the dream soured quickly. Lectures were rare, professors often absent, and hands-on training—the essence of becoming a doctor—was treated as optional.
The solution came not from his college, but from his phone. Like nearly all his classmates, Manish subscribed to Marrow, one of India’s dominant medical learning apps. His tuition fee for five years was Rs 90,000. His annual subscription for the app: Rs 50,000.
Manish isn't alone. Educational apps, which were meant to be supplementary, have become India’s future doctors’ syllabus and classroom.
A Parallel Classroom
Across India, from AIIMS Delhi to private colleges in Bihar, from BHU in Varanasi to Indian students in Ukraine preparing for the Foreign Medical Graduates Examination (FMGE), the story repeats. Students don’t just lean on apps like Marrow, Prepladder, DAMS, DBMCI, and Cerebellum, they rely on them as their primary teachers.
Garima, a final-year student at Bettiah who suffers from a damaged eardrum, has been medically advised to avoid earphones. Yet she spends hours listening to app lectures because classroom sessions are either absent or uninspiring.
“Our only hope of becoming competent doctors lies in apps,” she said. “In classrooms, professors seem uninterested and incapable.”
Attendance remains mandatory; 75% to sit for exams. However, meaningful teaching is scarce. As Garima put it, she pays her government college for a degree, and the app for an education.
The Economics of Education
The contrast in costs is stark. AIIMS Delhi, where a full MBBS course including hostel and food costs barely Rs 5,000, students spend upwards of Rs 70,000 on apps. In government colleges that charge around Rs 18,000 a year, students say their digital subscriptions and tablets push total costs close to Rs 1 lakh.
For private colleges, the burden is heavier. One student in Narayan Medical College, Bihar, spends Rs 66 lakh for his MBBS and another Rs 1 lakh on apps.
For students already paying between Rs 60 lakh and Rs 1 crore to attend private medical colleges, the marginal cost of app subscriptions is just another bite out of borrowed money and family sacrifices.
Some students try to cut costs by sharing accounts. Anubhuti (name changed), an MBBS student in Bihar, once split her Marrow subscription with a friend. But when they accidentally logged in simultaneously, her account was blocked for three months. She managed by renting logins and downloading pirated lectures on Telegram.
As Harshit Kumar from BHU put it bluntly: “We go to college only because 75% attendance is mandatory. I pay my college for the degree and the app for education.”
A Collapsing System
The explosion of apps is not accidental. It mirrors the collapse of India’s medical education infrastructure.
The dependence on apps is not accidental. It is rooted in a collapsing system of medical education. The Health Minister told the Rajya Sabha in August 2023 that more than two thousand faculty positions across AIIMS campuses were vacant. An RTI reply from March 2025 showed AIIMS Delhi itself short of roughly 35 percent of sanctioned faculty posts. A Parliamentary Standing Committee report published in February 2024, after inspecting 246 colleges, concluded that none met minimum faculty or senior-resident requirements; many institutions suffered from ghost faculties and zero attendance.
Dr. Dilip P. Bhanushali, President of the Indian Medical Association, explains why students increasingly turn to apps: “The number of medical colleges has increased over the years, and so has student intake. But faculty strength has not kept pace. Colleges are catering to more students, without additional infrastructure. Students feel they are missing out on both clinical and theoretical teaching, so they turn to apps where good teachers seem more accessible.”
The government has expanded MBBS seats aggressively—81% more colleges in a decade, 110% more MBBS seats, and 118% more PG seats. Dr. Ravi Wankhedkar, ex-President of the Indian Medical Association, call it a “political move” with declining quality.
For many, the apps have become lifelines.
“Earlier, coaching was limited to PG prep in big cities. Apps have democratised access. Now even students in small towns get the same material,” said Dr. Faizan, vice president of the All India Medical Students Association.
But he worries that the model is creating “MCQ doctors.” Instead of diving into textbooks, students now rely on summarised notes.
Dr. Bhanushali echoes the concern: “Every aspect of education today is multiple-choice questions. This produces well-learned students but not good doctors. In medicine, one plus one may not be two in different patients—you need clinical judgment. That can only be nurtured through ward exposure, examining patients under senior doctors. Apps don’t provide that.”
That trade-off matters. The anatomy syllabus at premier institutions allocates hundreds of hours to practicals; dissection, in-person demonstration and repeated mentoring are the kinds of experiences an algorithm cannot replicate.
Internships—ostensibly the crucible where theory meets patient—have become, students say, clerical; the year that used to be formative is now often spent either doing administrative shifts to check boxes or preparing relentlessly for PG entrance tests on an app.
Dr. Bhanushali warns: “Unlike engineering or law, medicine cannot be learned just from books or apps. You don’t get a second chance in medicine—it’s life and death. Without hands-on patient examination and differential diagnosis training, we are producing theoreticians, not clinicians. Apps completely miss this practical aspect.”
“We go to class because of attendance,” Vishal, a final-year student at AIIMS, said. “Most students are either scrolling on their phones or watching app lectures in class."
The App Business
Ironically, the Marrow app itself claims on the Play Store to be the “Gold Standard for NEET PG and SS [Super Speciality Entrance],” while its tagline for notes is, “Lean. Mean. Agile.”
The apps themselves, unsurprisingly, play both savior and brand. Marrow’s parent company, Neuroglia Health Private Limited, is part of a broader ecosystem with ties to Japan’s M3, Inc., and its reported revenues are substantial. Marrow alone earned Rs 528 crore in 2024. Their marketing is fierce—and often contradictory. In 2024, Marrow claimed all top ten NEET PG rankers were its subscribers. Their competitor, Prepladder claimed ranks 1, 2, 3, 4, and 9 while DBMCI claimed 1, 4, 5, and 9 and Cerebellum claimed 1, 4, and 9.
The founder and ex-CEO of the Marrow and DailyRounds, Deepu Sebin, claims in his LinkedIn bio that his two apps train around 80% of medical professionals in India. On the dailyrounds.org website, the claim is that Marrow is currently used by over 5 lakh medical students in India to prepare for the country’s largest medical competitive exam. Against a backdrop of roughly 1.18 lakh MBBS seats in 2024–25 and 2.28 lakh NEET PG applicants in the same year, the advertised numbers don’t add up.
Marrow’s own terms of service underscore the boundary: A disclaimer in Marrow App’s terms and conditions says, “You also understand that the services provided to You shall not be construed as medical classes and Our services do not come within the purview of medical training as regulated and recognized by Medical Council of India or other regulatory bodies.”
That institutional ambiguity complicates solutions. Some faculty see an opportunity in partnership. Dr. Sumit Kumar, head of medicine at GMC Bettiah, accepts that apps are filling gaps but worries about dependency. “If students are going to college just for attendance, that’s wrong because apps lack practical knowledge,” he said.
Other senior doctors worry this would codify a poorer standard of training nationwide. “Not studying theory is like going into the sea without navigation,” he said. “Only practicals without theory is like sailing with a map but no preparation.” On the question of financial burden on students, he suggested, “Government should consider adopting such apps for colleges, maybe through some kind of government-private partnership, and then provide such digital access to students.”
However, HOD of Emergency Medicine at Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, Delhi, Dr Seema Wasini, said, “These apps are the future of medical education, and the government should think about developing such digital infrastructure too.”
Dr. Bhanushali, however, stressed the need for systemic reform instead of stopgaps: “What requires to be done is a complete revamp of medical education, led not only by teachers but by senior clinicians. The National Medical Commission and Education Ministry must rethink exam and study patterns. Without this, we are heading toward a system that produces doctors who can clear tests but may falter in real wards.”
For students like Manish and Garima, the question remains: how to become skilled, compassionate doctors when their education is split between absentee classrooms and profit-driven apps?
