NEET PG Cut-Off Lowered To Fill Vacant Seats

As part of the NEET-PG 2025 eligibility criteria, the National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences (NBEMS) has declared that the qualifying percentiles of reserved candidates will be set at zero. This means that any candidate who scores as low as -40 out of 800 could theoretically qualify for the third round of counselling for the postgraduate medical seats. The announcement, made on Tuesday, has drawn strong condemnation from many members of the medical profession as they claim that this action will reduce quality of care.

 The decision was made after completion of the second round of the counselling process when it was noticed that there were still more than 18,000 postgraduate medical seats that had not been filled within both the public and private sectors as reported by Health ministry sources. 

One of the Health ministry officials said, "While there is a concerted effort to improve the quality of healthcare in this country through the establishment of a higher education system, leaving unoccupied postgraduate medical seats is detrimental to the development of an efficient healthcare delivery system and corresponds with a loss of valuable educational resources."

The Government of India states that the change will not affect the standards of the medical college degrees awarded through NEET-PG.  Government representatives assert that the revised cut-off only increases the pool of eligible candidates to apply for medical school, and thus will allow for the optimum utilisation of the physical and human resources available for medical training. The revised cut-off also supports previous years when similar measures were implemented in order to reduce the number of unallocated seats.