Delhi HC Dismisses Plea against Lowered NEET-PG Cut off
New Delhi: The Delhi High Court on Wednesday dismissed a public interest litigation against reduction of qualifying cut-off marks in NEET PG -2025 for admission to postgraduate medical courses. The petitioner alleged that a low cutoff would compromise the quality of medical professionals attending specialist courses and endanger human lives.
However, a bench comprising Chief Justice DK Upadhayay and Justice Tejas Karia said that the purpose of higher education is not to judge the quality of doctors but to develop more skills. He also questioned the petitioner on the number of doctors needed in the country and said he would allow the seats to remain vacant.
“Would it be in the public interest to leave the seats empty? No, we will not allow that,” the bench said. “The only argument we can muster is that lowering these cut-off scores will send less qualified MBBS doctors to pursue postgraduate studies. What is the purpose of imparting higher education? The purpose is to make them more competent in a field. This exam does not ipso facto assess the quality of a doctor,” he said.
The court stated that NEET PG only “ranks” MBBS graduates who are already qualified to practice allopathy for admission to a special course which they will eventually have to pass.
Counsel for the defendant authorities said the regulations allowed the cutoff to be reduced for filling vacancies in an academic year by increasing the pool of candidates.
He said after the completion of the second round of counselling, there are thousands of vacant seats across the country and a lesser cutoff would allow people lower in the merit list to opt for certain streams that would not otherwise be sought after.
He said the third round of consultation as per the reduced deduction is ongoing and therefore the government’s policy decision has been implemented.
He also said that a similar petition filed with the Supreme Court has not yet been listed there.
NBEMS’s decision to drastically reduce the cut-off percentile for candidates in all categories for NEET-PG 2025-26
With more than 18,000 postgraduate medical seats remaining vacant across the country, the National Board of Examinations for Medical Sciences (NBEMS) has revised the percentiles for NEET-PG 2025 admissions this month.
The cut-off has been reduced from 40 percent to zero for reserved categories; this enabled even those who scored as low as minus 40 out of 800 to appear in the third round of counseling for PG medical seats.
According to the notification issued by NBEMS, the NEET PG limit for general category has also been reduced from 50 to 7 percent.
