Lagatar24 Desk
New Delhi, June 10: The Supreme Court on Friday dismissed a batch of petitions seeking a special stray round of counselling to fill 1,456 seats in NEET-PG-21.
A bench of Justices MR Shah and Aniruddha Bose said that allowing a supplementary round of counselling to fill vacant postgraduate (PG) medicine seats will not be in the best interests of medical education and public health.
With this, the apex court had dismissed a plea filed by a group of doctors who qualified for the NEET-PG 2021 exam and requested supplementary counselling round, claiming a massive vacancy of 1,456 PG seats after admissions concluded on May 7.
“Petitioners are not entitled to a writ of mandamus for a special stray round of counselling as granting of such relief may affect medical education and public health,” the bench said.
“Even after 8-9 rounds of counselling, out of the 40,000 seats, only 1,456 seats are vacant. Of that, over 1,000 are non-clinical posts,” it added.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court reserved its decision on the petition after the Centre stated that vacant seats arise every year due to non-clinical or teaching positions, which are not favoured by doctors because they do not advance their careers.
According to the Centre, 1,100 of the 1,456 vacant seats are in private colleges with excessive prices and 300 are in government colleges. Furthermore, non-clinical courses account for 76% of overall openings, thus adding another round will serve little purpose. The Centre also stated that the NEET-PG 2022 counselling procedure will commence in July and that the software for NEET-PG 2021 counselling has closed.
The bench emphasised in its decision that the Centre and the Medical Counselling Committee (MCC) must stick to the timetable, which would only be achievable if the NEET-PG 2022 admission process runs smoothly. The bench also highlighted that the PG 2021 session, which was supposed to start last year, is already a year behind schedule.
