New Delhi, Jan 21 (PTI) The Delhi High Court on Wednesday dismissed a public interest litigation against the lowering of qualifying cut-off marks in NEET PG -2025 for admission to postgraduate medical
courses.
The petitioner claimed that a low cut off would compromise the quality of medical professionals joining the specialization courses, endangering human lives.
A bench of Chief Justice D K Upadhayay and Justice Tejas Karia, however, said the purpose of higher education was development of further skills and not to judge the quality of doctors.
It also questioned the petitioner on the numbers of doctors required in the country and said it would let seats remain vacant.
"Will it be in public interest to leave the seats vacant? No, we will not permit," remarked the bench.
"The only argument we can gather is (that) lowering this cut off marks will send MBBS doctors with less competence to pursue their postgraduate. What is the purpose of granting higher education? Purpose is to make them more skilled in an area. This exam does not ipso facto judge the quality of a doctor," it said.
The court stated that NEET PG only "sorted" MBBS graduates, who are anyway entitled to practice allopathy, for admission to a specialized course, which they would have to eventually pass.
The counsel for the respondent authorities said the regulations permitted lowering of the cut-off to fill vacant seats in an academic year by increasing the pool of candidates.
He said after the completion of the second round of counselling, there were thousands of seats vacant nationwide and a lesser cut-off would allow those lower in the merit list to opt for certain streams that are otherwise not sought after.
Third round of counselling pursuant to the lowered cut off was going on and the policy decision of the government has therefore been implemented, he said.
He also said a similar petition filed in the Supreme Court was yet to be listed there.
NBEMS's decision to drastically reduce the cut-off percentile for candidates across all categories for NEET-PG 2025-26
With over 18,000 postgraduate medical seats across the country remaining vacant, the National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences (NBEMS) revised the qualifying percentiles for NEET-PG 2025 admissions this month.
The cut-off was reduced to zero from 40 percentile for reserved categories -- which made 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 cutoff for the general category was also reduced to seven percentile from 50. PTI ADS ZMN
