Kamal Ghorui
Despite a steep reduction in the qualifying percentile for NEET-PG 2025, 1,140 postgraduate medical seats remained vacant after the Stray Round of counselling, according to a Rajya Sabha reply tabled by the Union health ministry on March 17th. The number is not large enough to trigger panic. But it is significant enough to keep alive an old question in medical admissions: If seats remain empty even after repeated intervention, where exactly does the problem lie?The government’s response this year was to widen eligibility. The ministry said the qualifying percentile was reduced in order to ensure that “valuable PG medical seats do not remain vacant”. For the 2025 admission cycle, the cut-off was brought down to above the 7th percentile for the unreserved category and above the 5th percentile for UR-PwD candidates. For SC, ST and OBC candidates, all were declared qualified for counselling.Yet the seats did not fill up. This is what gives the latest figure its significance. A lower cut-off usually expands the pool of candidates available for allotment. When vacancies persist despite that, the issue appears to move beyond the entrance threshold itself. The Parliament reply does not spell out the reasons, but the data suggests that widening eligibility alone has not resolved the vacancy problem in PG medical admissions.The matter came up in Parliament through a question that also asked whether the Centre was considering discontinuing NEET, calling the examination exclusionary in nature. However, the government ruled out any such move and reiterated its support for NEET as the common entrance mechanism for medical admissions across the country. The ministry referred to the provision of Section 14 of the National Medical Commission Act, 2019, which provides for a uniform entrance test for undergraduate and postgraduate medical education. It described NEET as a “historic reform” that has improved transparency and liberated students from the obligation to take more than one entrance exam.That makes the present situation more layered than a simple debate over the exam. NEET is still non-negotiable in theory. It is supported by the NMC framework as provided in law. It’s still being sold in policy language as the vehicle for reform. But the vacancy number placed before Parliament shows that the admission system continues to face a problem that cannot be addressed by legal defence alone.Part of that complexity lies in how counselling itself is organised. The reply notes that the Medical Counselling Committee (MCC), under the Directorate General of Health Services, handles counselling for 50% of All India Quota seats and 100% of seats in Central and Deemed Universities. State governments conduct counselling for State quota seats, while state counselling authorities also handle private medical college admissions.That fragmented structure means the vacancy issue does not sit in one office or under one authority. Eligibility may be national, but allotment and uptake are spread across multiple layers. When seats remain vacant after repeated rounds of counselling, the problem may reflect not just who is allowed to compete, but also where the seats are located, how they are priced, and how they are perceived by candidates.The ministry’s reply, however, does not delve into those factors. It confines itself to the numbers, the percentile reduction, and the government’s defence of NEET. But taken together, those details point to a broader challenge in the PG medical admission process. If seats remain vacant even after the qualifying bar has been lowered sharply, the issue is unlikely to be explained by access alone.For now, the Centre’s stand is clear: NEET stays. The larger question is whether the system around it is working as intended.
