The National Medical Commission (NMC) is planning to do away with ‘physical counselling’ of students aspiring to get into medical colleges, a practice that has been misused.
The regulator plans to mandate medical colleges to conduct online counselling for admissions to eliminate the practice of students with low ranks securing admissions by paying hefty donation fees to colleges.
Sections 14 and 15 of the NMC Act, 2019 empowers the NMC to regulate the manner of conducting counselling for admission to MBBS and post-grad medical seats in all the medical institutions.
‘Plan is to make counselling process more streamlined, efficient’
“The plan is to make the counselling process for admission against medical seats more streamlined and efficient without the involvement of agents. Therefore, it has been decided that from academic year 2024-25, all the counselling will happen in the online mode in support with the State and Central government counselling agencies to avoid manual interference,” said an official aware of the matter.
Whenever NEET UG & PG exams take place, many unscrupulous ‘agents’ gather outside the examination centre. They fetch the data of students from their own sources and make underhand offers to get them admission in medical colleges.
“No admission will take place through physical counselling. This will cut the demand of huge donations and admissions of students with low rank. Most of the time, students also reach out to these agents fearing that they will not get admission,” the official added.
The UG and PG medical counselling process is planned to start on 15 August and September respectively.
The medical education regulator has also directed medical colleges to declare the total number of undergraduate and postgraduate seats on the official website of NMC.
“Earlier, there used to be confusion on the number of seats medical colleges used to have. There have been instances of fake allotment of seat for MBBS course was issued under the alleged signature of Secretary, NMC. Due to this, students and parents used to fall into the traps of miscreants,” the official said.
Also, the plan involves holding a centralized national-level counselling for private medical colleges, rather than a different one conducted for each state. This in turn will also help save the applicants the pressure of applying to multiple colleges by paying a minimum fee of ₹2 lakh each.
“This practice is used to exploit students financially,” the official said.
The government has been making effort to increase the number of medical colleges and subsequently MBBS seats.
The Union minister of state for health and family welfare, Anupriya Singh Patel, recently informed Rajya Sabha that there has been an increase of 88% in medical colleges from 387 before 2014 to 731 as of now. Further, there is an increase of 118% in MBBS seats from 51,348 before 2014 to 1,12,112 as of now. There is also an increase of 133% in PG seats from 31,185 before 2014 to 72,627 till 31 July.
Queries sent to the health ministry spokesperson remained unanswered till press time.