Khiva has been inhabited for more than 2,500 years. The city’s old inner town — Itchan Kala — is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a walled complex of mosques, minarets, and madrasas that has barely changed since the medieval Silk Road era. It has also been home to one of Uzbekistan’s newest private medical institutions since 2020. Mamun University Faculty of Medicine was founded in Khiva by Arslon Otanazarovich in a region with no private medical university at the time. The name itself is a deliberate reference to al-Ma’mun, the Abbasid caliph who turned the medieval Khorezm region into one of the most intellectually active centres in the known world. That’s the framing the university has set for itself. Whether it lives up to it is a conversation worth having once you look at what it has actually built in under five years.
The growth since 2020 has been fast and measurable. What began as a small medical academy in Khiva has expanded to more than three campuses across two adjacent cities — Khiva and Urgench, roughly 35 kilometres apart. Today, 13,000+ students study at Mamun University across undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral programmes spanning medicine, finance, psychology, history, and business. Approximately 850 faculty members are engaged across 12 departments. For a private institution that did not exist six years ago, that scale is worth noting before dismissing it as a newcomer.
The Faculty of Medicine offers the MBBS entirely in English over six years: five years of academic and para-clinical training followed by one year of compulsory clinical internship, fully aligned with the NMC’s 2021 guidelines. The university functions under the dual oversight of Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Health and Ministry of Science and Education. It is recognised by the WHO and listed in WDOMS — the World Directory of Medical Schools — which is the verification standard used by India’s NMC, ECFMG in the US, and the GMC in the UK to assess the validity of foreign degrees. Indian graduates are eligible to sit for FMGE/NExT after completing the programme.
The location is one of the most distinctive features of this university, and also one of the most consistently underexplained in consultancy blogs. Khiva and Urgench sit in the Khorezm region of northwestern Uzbekistan, about 1,000 kilometres from Tashkent and roughly 90 minutes by air. The climate is a continental desert: short, mild winters (−1°C to +5°C) and long, dry summers (+20°C to +32°C). This is not a university embedded in a major metropolis. It is quieter, cheaper, and far less distracting than Tashkent — which, depending on the student, is either a drawback or the whole point. Monthly living costs in Khiva and Urgench run at Rs 8,000 to Rs 12,000, among the lowest of any Uzbek university city, which is one of the reasons Mamun’s total six-year package at Rs 23.17 lakh is consistently cited as the most affordable MBBS option in Uzbekistan.
The Indian mess is optional at Mamun, not mandatory — an important distinction to keep in mind when budgeting. It costs USD 1,200 per year as an add-on if students want it. The university otherwise provides hostel accommodation at USD 650 per year, with new hostels recently completed for both the Khiva and Urgench campuses. Indian students began enrolling at Mamun relatively recently, and hundreds of them have already cleared FMGE/NExT and are now practising in India. That track record is still young by the standards of older Uzbek institutions, but it is building and verifiable.