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The National Medical Commission (NMC), the regulatory body for medical education and medical professionals, is looking for ways to streamline the medical counselling process to make it more stakeholder-friendly and ensure no seats go vacant.
Over the last few years, the counselling process has been affected by repeated delays owing to the pandemic and litigations pertaining to the EWS quota. There has also been criticism of the government’s recent move of doing away with a qualifying percentile for post-graduate (PG) seats. This has resulted in seats being allocated to people scoring as low as five out of 800. As per the government, the move was to ensure that no seats for further specialised training of doctors remain vacant.
An official said the NMC exercise on the counselling process “will help (it) understand the reasons behind seats remaining vacant and what can be done to address it”.
The Medical Counselling Commission, which conducts counselling for under-graduate, PG, and super-speciality seats, is learnt to have made a presentation on this process recently.
Ways to optimise it will be discussed in another meeting before being presented in the next NMC meet on November 30, it is learnt.
“Our mission at NMC is to raise the standard of medical education in India and a transparent and smooth counselling process adds to that goal,” said NMC chairman Dr BN Gangadhar.
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There were only 31,185 PG seats in the country before 2014. For the current session, it has increased to nearly 68,000.
For the 2020-21 session, there were 55,495 PG seats and 1,425 seats remained vacant after the mop-up and stray rounds of counselling. In 2021-22 there were 60,202 seats and 3,744 remained vacant, according to data shared by the Union Health Minister in Parliament. The number of PG seats increased to 64,059 for the 2022-23 session.
While there are more undergraduate seats, fewer seats have remained vacant over the years. There were 80,312 MBBS seats in 2019-20 when vacancies stood at 273. For the session 2021-22, there were 92,065 MBBS seats, of which 197 were vacant.
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