PC&PNDT Act, 1994

The Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PC&PNDT) Act, 1994 is the Indian law that regulates the use of techniques capable of determining the sex of a foetus, and prohibits sex selection before or after conception. It requires every genetic clinic, genetic laboratory and ultrasound or imaging centre offering prenatal diagnostic procedures to register with the appropriate authority and maintain detailed, auditable records of every procedure performed on-site.

Why it matters in a hospital

For any hospital or diagnostic centre offering obstetric ultrasound, PC&PNDT compliance is not optional paperwork — it is a legal condition of operating that equipment at all. Registration, complete and accurate record-keeping, and timely statutory filing are all things health authorities can and do inspect, and given the Act's purpose, gaps in the record are treated as a serious matter rather than a minor administrative oversight. The Act's approach — treating prenatal sex determination as a serious offence with real penalties, not a minor lapse — is a deliberate response to India's historically skewed sex ratio, which is worth understanding as the reason the compliance requirements are as strict as they are.

How Trisvio handles it

Trisvio maintains a PC&PNDT compliance register as one of its statutory-register features, capturing the required record against the patient encounter at the point of the scan, locking a filled record once it's finalised so it can't be silently edited afterward, and producing a monthly export formatted for external filing. Keeping this as a distinct register, rather than a note buried in a general consultation record, is what makes it realistic to produce a complete filing at the end of the month rather than reconstructing it scan by scan.