Pharmacy education in India at an inflection point: Current trends, future scope, and caveats - a narrative review

Pharmacy education in India is undergoing simultaneous curricular, pedagogical, and regulatory change, and a revised draft National Pharmacy Commission (NPC) Bill was released for public consultation in July 2026. Existing accounts treat these developments separately or assume that internationally derived evidence transfers to Indian conditions. This review integrates them and appraises that assumption.

Narrative review. PubMed and OpenAlex were searched on July 2026 for publications from 2005 to 2026 using thematic and India-specific strands (1902 and 41 PubMed records; 1287 and 116 OpenAlex records), supplemented by a primary corpus of Indian pharmacy legislation and regulations. Sources were purposively selected and charted against six thematic domains.

Six convergent trends were identified: competency- and outcome-based curricula; consolidation of clinical pharmacy through the PharmD; experiential and interprofessional learning; simulation; digital and AI-assisted instruction; and a nascent research culture. Implementation is constrained by faculty preparedness, assessment burden, institutional heterogeneity, and resource disparity. India-specific outcome evidence is scarce: no published studies link educational interventions to graduate competency, licensure performance, or employment outcomes at national scale.

Reform should sequence enabling capacity ahead of mandated standards. Priorities are an adapted domestic competency framework, national faculty-development infrastructure, preceptor certification, and explicit AI governance. The proposed exit test and institutional rating could generate the outcome data the field lacks, if paired with research access and improvement support rather than ranking alone.