The Centre has decided to lower the qualifying marks in the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test for post graduate students of medicine. The decision to bring down the cut-off by 6 percentile has been taken in consultation with the Medical Council of India. The new cut-off would be 44 percentile for candidates in the general category, 39 percentile for those in the disabilities category and 34 for the SC/ST/OBC category.
“We had representatives from several states requesting us to lower the percentile to fill up about 2,000 PG seats that are lying vacant across several states. These are seats for pre and para clinical courses such as anatomy, physiology and biochemistry, among others. While the seats for the clinical subjects get filled up fast, those for pre and para clinical ones are left vacant because students are reluctant to opt for them. A few seats in clinical subjects in private colleges are also vacant,” a senior official in the Union health ministry told THE WEEK.
The latest decision would render 8,000 students eligible for opting for these courses during the NEET counselling sessions. Some of these students would “willingly” take up these seats spread across government and private colleges. Last year though, the Centre had to lower the cut-off by 15 percentile, the official said.
By lowering the cut-offs by 6 percentile, the actual percentage obtained by the candidates would go down by 3 per cent only.
In May 2018, in a letter to the editor of Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, a professor in the department of physiology at a medical college in Mumbai had pointed out the plight of postgraduates in pre and para clinical fields in India, the struggle to find jobs and the common trend of these postgraduates being forced to take up posts like that of medical officer, just to make ends meet. Eventually, they feel cheated at having wasted three or four years to achieve an MD in such a specialisation, the letter said, imploring experts to look into the various factors responsible for the state of affairs in this field.
This year, 1.5 lakh MBBS students gave the NEET PG exam, competing for the 40,000 post graduate seats in the country.
