Top Gastroenterology Conferences in India: ISGCON, INASL, SGEI & WCOG 2026
Published on 15/04/2026
Your complete guide to India's leading gastroenterology research conferences — ISGCON, INASL, SGEI Endocon, IASGCON & WCOG 2026. Dates, focus areas, and how to engage.
A DM physician at a tier-2 hospital spends hours each week parsing conflicting treatment protocols for NAFLD — one from a US guideline body, another from a European liver society. Neither accounts for Indian dietary patterns, genetic predispositions, or the public-health context of a country carrying nearly 20% of the world's chronic liver disease burden. The answer, most of the time, isn't in a journal — it's on a conference floor in Varanasi, Amritsar, or New Delhi, where Indian gastroenterologists are producing and debating exactly that evidence. This post maps every major national conference where that work happens.
India's gastroenterology disease burden is distinctive. Helicobacter pylori prevalence remains above 50% in many populations. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is accelerating alongside the metabolic syndrome epidemic. Inflammatory bowel disease is rising sharply in urban cohorts, yet presentation patterns diverge from Western populations in ways that make direct guideline application unreliable. Research on these nuances does not emerge from single-centre case reports — it emerges from the multi-institutional collaborations, abstract presentations, and consensus workshops that national conferences make possible.
For Indian gastroenterologists, residents, and researchers, knowing which conferences matter — and what each one offers — is not a scheduling convenience. It is a core part of staying current and contributing to evidence that is clinically relevant to Indian patients. The landscape of gastroenterology conferences in India is richer than many outside the field realise, spanning medical gastroenterology, hepatology, surgical gastroenterology, and advanced endoscopy as distinct but interlinked domains.
The National Pillars: ISGCON, INASL, and SGEI Endocon
Three societies form the backbone of organised gastroenterology in India, and their annual or semi-annual meetings function as the primary venues for disseminating Indian GI research.
ISGCON — Annual Congress of the Indian Society of Gastroenterology
Organised by: Indian Society of Gastroenterology (ISG) · Over 4,000 members across 21 state chapters
Annual: December
ISGCON is the flagship national event for medical gastroenterology in India. Held every December, the 65th edition convened in Varanasi in December 2024, and the 66th — ISGCON 2025 — was organised in Amritsar from 3–6 December 2025, with 2,000–2,500 delegates and both national and international faculty. The conference publishes its abstracts in a dedicated supplement of the Indian Journal of Gastroenterology, making it a PubMed-indexed source of Indian GI research. Symposia, live procedure demonstrations, orations, and best-paper competitions give the meeting both educational and competitive depth. The P.N. Chhuttani Distinguished Achievement Oration and the R.K. Tandon Oration are among the most prestigious recognitions in Indian academic gastroenterology — both awarded at ISGCON.
INASL Annual Meeting — Indian National Association for Study of the Liver
Organised by: INASL · Focused on hepatology and liver disease
Annual: Mid-term meetings
INASL runs a full annual scientific meeting alongside several mid-term and subspecialty events each year. The joint national meeting with ISG and SGEI — typically held in October-November — is the largest single gathering for hepatologists and gastroenterologists in India in the autumn calendar. In 2024, the 32nd Annual Scientific Meeting was held in Kochi. INASL's upcoming calendar includes the Bengal Liver Summit (January 2026, Kolkata), Grand Rounds in Hepatology (May 2026, Mumbai), and the INASL-ILCA School of Liver Cancer. Each meeting generates symposia and consensus statements directly relevant to Indian liver disease management.
SGEI Endocon — Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy of India
Organised by: SGEI · ~1,950 members · Advanced endoscopy focus
Two meetings/year : Live workshops
SGEI holds two annual meetings. The first, typically in February-March, is a two-day live endoscopy workshop covering both basic and advanced procedures — EUS, ERCP, ESD, POEM, and endo-bariatric techniques. The second is the joint national meeting with ISG and INASL. SGEI collaborates with the World Endoscopy Organisation (WEO), OMED, and the American Society of GI Endoscopy (ASGE), and regularly hosts international endoscopists for interactive sessions. For trainees, the SGEI workshop circuit is among the most practical skill-building opportunities available in the country.
Case in point
A second-year DM Gastroenterology resident presents an abstract at ISGCON on the prevalence of H. pylori clarithromycin resistance in a tertiary centre cohort from eastern India — data that directly challenges the standard first-line triple therapy recommendations still cited in most institutional protocols. The abstract is accepted for an oral presentation in the clinical research session.
The presentation prompts a floor discussion with investigators from three other centres who have documented similar resistance trends. By the end of the conference, the resident has been invited to join a multicentre collaborative audit — the kind of collaboration that turns a single-centre observation into nationally generalisable evidence. This is the specific mechanism by which ISGCON generates research that reshapes Indian clinical practice, and why conference participation for residents is not extracurricular — it is formative.
Beyond the Big Three: IASGCON, State Chapters, and WCOG 2026
IASGCON — Indian Association of Surgical Gastroenterology
Organised by: IASG (a section of Association of Surgeons of India) · Founded 1988
Annual : Surgical GI focus
IASG focuses exclusively on surgical gastroenterology — laparoscopic procedures, hepatopancreaticobiliary surgery, GI oncology, and bariatric surgery. IASGCON draws surgeons with subspecialty interest in the GI tract, and the annual meeting features live surgical demonstrations, debates on management controversies (e.g., timing of cholecystectomy in acute cholecystitis, surgical vs. endoscopic management of common bile duct stones), and postgraduate clinical courses. For gastroenterologists managing complex patients who will need surgical input, understanding the surgical gastroenterology literature that emerges from IASGCON is directly relevant to shared decision-making.
WCOG 2026 — World Congress of Gastroenterology · New Delhi
Venue: Yashobhoomi Convention Centre, New Delhi · Dates: 30 September – 3 October 2026
Global : Landmark
The World Congress of Gastroenterology returns to India in 2026 — a landmark event that will position Indian GI research on the global stage. Hosted at Yashobhoomi in New Delhi from 30 September to 3 October 2026, WCOG 2026 will draw gastroenterologists, hepatologists, endoscopists, and researchers from across the world. For Indian clinicians and researchers, this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to present work to an international audience, engage with cutting-edge global protocols, and establish collaborations that influence Indian research priorities for years ahead.
State chapter meetings — including TNISGCON (Tamil Nadu), the Bengal Liver Summit, and ISGKCON (Karnataka) — are where regional disease patterns and local practice variations receive dedicated attention. These smaller, focused meetings often generate the hypothesis-forming data that subsequently appears in national conference abstracts and peer-reviewed publications.
A frequently overlooked point about conference engagement
Most gastroenterologists attend conferences for the plenary sessions and live demonstrations — the visible content. The less visible but arguably more valuable output is the informal consensus that forms around contested clinical questions: How long should bismuth quadruple therapy run in a high-resistance setting? At what platelet count do experienced Indian hepatologists actually scope a patient with cirrhosis? What are the real complication rates of ESD at Indian volume centres? These conversations happen in hallways, at dinner tables, and in breakout workshops — they don't appear in the abstract supplements. This is why the argument for attending rather than just reading the proceedings is not about prestige. It's about accessing a layer of clinical reasoning that never makes it to print.
Bottom line for clinical practice
ISGCON every December is the single most important date on the Indian gastroenterology calendar — abstract submission opens months in advance and the proceedings are PubMed-indexed via the Indian Journal of Gastroenterology.
INASL's mid-term meetings (Bengal Liver Summit, Grand Rounds in Hepatology) are not smaller versions of the annual meeting — they are specialty-dense, focused events often better for hepatologists than the larger joint congress.
SGEI's February-March live workshop is the highest-yield skills event for trainees in therapeutic endoscopy — prioritise it before seeking international hands-on courses.
WCOG 2026 in New Delhi is a once-in-a-generation home-ground opportunity to establish international research collaborations. Begin preparing abstracts now.
State chapter meetings (TNISGCON, Bengal Liver Summit, ISGKCON) are where the hypothesis-generating regional data lives — they deserve a place in the annual calendar alongside the national meetings.
Before you walk into your next conference, let GastroAGI help you map the clinical questions worth pursuing — from IBD phenotyping to H. pylori resistance patterns. Walk the AI through your patient caseload, and it will return guideline-anchored reasoning and research angles in seconds. Go in with a question worth answering.