Centre cuts NEET-SS cutoff to the 30th percentile to fill 1,857 empty seats

The Union government told the Supreme Court on 17 September that the qualifying mark for the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test for Super Speciality courses will fall from the 50th percentile to the 30th for a special stray vacancy round. After two counselling rounds, 1,857 super-speciality seats are empty: 1,094 DM and M.Ch. seats and 763 DNB-SS seats. Many of them sit in narrow surgical and medical disciplines that already run short of consultants.

A government note filed before a bench headed by Justice P.S. Narasimha said the change had been reconsidered with the relevant bodies so that training capacity is used rather than left idle. Candidates at or above the 30th percentile become eligible for the extra round. The Centre estimates that about 6,000 additional people will enter the pool, roughly three candidates for each empty seat.

Only candidates who did not take a seat in earlier rounds can use the new window. The vacant seats will not be reopened to people who have already joined a programme.

The Tamil Nadu slice

The same note returns 40 vacant in-service seats to Tamil Nadu. Those seats had been pulled into the all-India pool after they went unfilled. The state, represented by senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi, Additional Advocate General Prashanto Chandra Sen and advocate Rupali Samuel, had challenged that diversion. The petition argued that seats reserved for serving government doctors in Tamil Nadu should not migrate simply because the first rounds failed to fill them.

Additional Solicitor General Aishwarya Bhati appeared for the Centre. The court listed the matter again three weeks after Tamil Nadu finishes its own counselling on the returned seats.

In-service quotas exist because state hospitals need specialists who will stay in the public system after training. When those seats drift into the national list, the state loses both the training slot and the bonded doctor. Sending 40 seats back does not rebuild a whole cadre. It does stop this year’s leakage on those 40 lines.

Why seats go empty

Super-speciality programmes are long. A doctor who sits NEET-SS has already finished MBBS and a postgraduate degree. The 50th percentile cutoff was meant to keep a quality floor. It also left seats unused in disciplines that few candidates choose, or in cities that few candidates want. The court had earlier told the Centre to look again at a hard cutoff that produces empty operating theatres and empty ICUs.

Lowering the floor to the 30th percentile is a supply decision. It assumes that a candidate at that mark can still be trained into a safe specialist and that an empty seat is worse than a weaker incoming score. That assumption will be tested in the departments that take the extra students. The government did not publish the subject-wise vacancy list with the note. Without that list it is not possible to see whether the empty seats are in cardiac surgery, neonatology, or fields with less acute shortage.

What the extra round will and will not fix

Six thousand newly eligible names against 1,857 seats sounds like a surplus. It is not a surplus if those names are clustered in the same popular subjects that already filled. The stray round only works if enough of the newly eligible candidates are willing to take the unfilled disciplines and the unfilled cities. The note does not say how the matching will be done beyond the existing counselling machinery.

For patients the relevant number is not the percentile. It is whether a government hospital that planned for a new neurosurgeon in 2027 actually gets one. Thursday’s filing is an attempt to stop another year of planned posts sitting vacant because the exam floor and the preference list did not meet. The three-week return date will show whether Tamil Nadu can fill its 40 and whether the national stray round moves the other 1,817.