
NEET-PG seat cutoffs slashed as specialist doctors' vacancies pile up
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. New Delhi: With over 18,000 postgraduate medical seats vacant and hospitals facing a shortage of specialists, the National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences (NBEMS) has moved to prevent a costly waste of training capacity.
After the second round of NEET-PG 2025 counselling for seats sought by qualified doctors, the regulator “significantly" lowered the cut-off marks to ensure that thousands of seats across 541 government and private medical colleges are filled, according to two officials familiar with the decision. The scale of the cutoff lowering announced on Wednesday is big.
“To ensure these seats do not go unfilled, the eligibility percentile for the unreserved (UR) category was reduced from 50 to 7, while for SC, ST and OBC (scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and other backward classes) categories, it was lowered from 40 to zero," a third official said. This official also said that this was not the first time such measures had been taken to address vacancies.
"Last year, the percentile was reduced to 5 (for the unreserved category), and in the previous years, it had even been brought down to zero to ensure seats are not left vacant," he added. With the current zero-percentile threshold for the reserved categories, any student who sat for the exam is now effectively eligible for the counseling process.
Allotments will continue through authorized, transparent counseling mechanisms based on NEET-PG ranks and candidate preferences, with no provision for direct or discretionary admissions, the officials said. “Leaving such a massive number of seats vacant undermines national efforts to improve healthcare delivery and results in the loss of valuable educational resources," said
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