Mumbai: Post-graduate doctors scoring as low as 20 percentile in NEET-SS will now be eligible for super specialty seats in the country.
Despite two rounds of admissions, over one-fifth of the seats in the courses are lying vacant. To ensure these seats do not go wasted, the National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences slashed the cutoffs to 20 percentile from 50. In some of the courses, the raw scores for eligibility have dropped even to 188 or 217 out of 600.
On February 8, the board issued a circular announcing the special mop-up round in NEET-SS counselling and also the revised cut-offs in different specialty groups. The schedule for the mop-up round will be released soon.
An official from the ministry of health and family welfare said that approximately 1,000 seats are vacant out of close to 5,000 superspecialty seats in the country.
The Federation of Resident Doctors’ Association India had requested the Centre to relax the eligibility criteria to ensure there is no wastage of seats, after receiving representations from aspirants, said Dr Kulsaurabh Kaushik, a member. He said sometimes seats go vacant in private colleges because of higher fees.
Dr Avinash Supe, former dean of KEM Hospital, said, “Total SS seats in the country have gone up tremendously in recent years and students have become selective. For instance, in the surgical group, many are now preferring urology, gastrointestinal (GI) surgery and surgical oncology, whereas there is not much demand for paediatric, or cardiovascular and thoracic surgery. You need larger set-ups for these, which many cannot invest in. On the contrary, urology and GI surgeries need smaller set-ups and there is a demand too,” said Supe.
He added in some courses, supply is higher than demand in the country. For a long time, even KEM did not get students for courses such as paediatric surgery.
Last year, the Centre brought down the cut-off to 15 percentile after seats remained vacant in superspecialty courses.