NEW DELHI: After facing severe backlash last year for reducing the cut-off percentile to zero for admission to medical colleges for super speciality courses, the Centre Thursday told Supreme Court that it has decided not to reduce cut-off marks this year, but the top court asked govt to take a fresh look and reconsider its decision.Additional solicitor general Aishwarya Bhati told a bench of Justices P S Narasimha and Alok Aradhe about govt’s decision. She informed the court that the decision was arrived at after consultations between all stakeholders – ministry of health, medical counselling committee (MCC) and National Medical Commission (NMC).“As per the directions of Supreme Court in the Kevin Joy case (2023), it has been decided to conduct a ‘special stray round’ by the medical counselling committee for the purpose of filling up the vacant super speciality seats arising out of NEET-SS 2025 counselling without reduction in the percentile criteria prescribed for admission in the said special stray round,” Bhati said while placing before the court a one-page note on govt’s decision.Advocate Rashmi Nandakumar, appearing for some of the petitioners, however, told the bench that around 2,000 seats in colleges would remain vacant if the cut-off percentile was not reduced. She said the authorities have consistently adopted appropriate measures, including special rounds, mop-up rounds, stray vacancy rounds and relaxation of eligibility criteria, whenever substantial super speciality seats remained vacant to ensure optimum utilisation of available seats.Taking note that a substantial number of seats would get wasted, the bench asked the Centre to reconsider its decision and brief the court on the next date of hearing. As the ASG urged the court to put it in its order, the bench passed a brief order on reconsideration of the decision. The petitioners pleaded that at least a mop-up/stray vacancy round be conducted for seats remaining vacant after completion of the ongoing counselling process so that no super speciality seat was allowed to go to waste.
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With over 18,000 post-graduate medical seats across the country remaining vacant, the National Board of Examination in Medical Sciences (NBEMS) revised the qualifying percentile for NEET-PG 2025 admissions, reducing it to zero from the 40th percentile for reserved categories — which enabled even those scoring as low as minus 40 out of 800 to take part in the third round of counselling for PG medical seats. According to the notice published by NBEMS, the NEET-PG cut-off for the general category was reduced to the seventh percentile from the 50th.
