28/09/2026
*4 Marks. An MS Seat. What Exactly Is Happening to Medical Merit*?
A candidate who scored 4 out of 800 in NEET-PG 2025 was reportedly allotted an MS Orthopaedics seat at Pandit Bhagwat Dayal Sharma Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Rohtak.
Let that sink in.
This was not an MBBS admission. It was a postgraduate medical seat, a pathway to becoming a specialist.
The controversy followed the sharp reduction of NEET-PG qualifying thresholds for the third counselling round:
General/EWS: 103 marks
General PwBD: 90 marks
SC/ST/OBC: 40 marks
These revised scores were officially notified by NBEMS.
The stated justification was familiar: thousands of postgraduate seats were vacant, and the eligibility pool had to be widened.
The result?
NBEMS told the Supreme Court that the relaxation made 95,913 additional candidates eligible for counselling.
But here is the uncomfortable question:
When does expanding access become dilution of standards?
There is an important distinction between:
Qualifying for counselling.
Obtaining a rank.
Being allotted a seat.
Completing rigorous postgraduate training.
Becoming competent to treat patients independently.
These are not the same thing.
And before the outrage becomes misinformation, another distinction must be made clear:
The viral comparison claiming that a general-category candidate needed 585 marks for the same Rohtak MS Orthopaedics seat has not been independently verified from publicly available counselling records for the same institution, course, category and round.
So, 585 should be presented as an attributed claim, not an established closing score.
The broader issue, however, is real.
India’s medical admission system operates through different qualifying thresholds, reserved seat pools, quotas and counselling rules. In the MBBS system, AIQ and state quotas also create substantial differences between qualifying marks and actual admission cut-offs.
But reservation policy does not mean that every reserved-category candidate gets admission at the qualifying score. A qualifying score merely opens the door to counselling. The actual cut-off depends on rank, seat availability, category, domicile, choices and the counselling round.
The debate must therefore avoid two dishonest extremes:
Extreme 1: Pretending that all category-wise cut-offs are identical.
Extreme 2: Pretending that a qualifying threshold is automatically the same as the admission standard.
The real question is not whether vacant seats should be filled.
The real question is:
Can a system fill vacant specialist seats without compromising the competence expected from the person who will eventually treat patients?
Vacant seats are an administrative problem.
Poorly trained specialists could become a public-health problem.
