NEET: Supreme court tells NMC, centre to frame tamper-free rules to prevent unnecessary litigation

New Delhi: To prevent recurring litigation over medical admissions every year, which creates uncertainty for candidates, the Supreme Court of India asked the National Medical Commission (NMC) and the Centre to frame clear, tamper-free rules for NEET-based admissions.

A bench of Justices P S Narasimha and Alok Aradhe observed that courts are annually flooded with petitions after the declaration of NEET results. The bench suggested implementing a mechanism to review the rules every year so that the rules can be improved.

The court emphasised that the country is mature enough to build sound institutions and said that more rigour needs to be infused into the selection process.

The observations came while the court was hearing a batch of petitions challenging the recent reduction in NEET-PG qualifying cut-off marks. Earlier, notices had already been issued to the Centre and the NMC in the matter.

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The controversy stems from a decision by the National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences (NBEMS), which revised the qualifying percentile for NEET-PG 2025 admissions.

With over 18,000 postgraduate medical seats lying vacant, the board reduced the cut-off to zero percentile for reserved categories (from 40 percentile earlier), allowing even very low-scoring candidates to participate in the third round of counselling, reports TOI

NBE in a notice dated 13.01.2026, reduced the minimum qualifying percentile cut-off for counselling of the third round of National Eligibility-Entrance Test Postgraduate (NEET-PG) 2025-2026 for various categories of candidates.

As per the revised qualifying percentiles for NEET-PG 2025, for the academic session 2025-2026, for the General/EWS, General PwBD, SC/ST/OBC(Including PwBD of SC/ST/OBC) categories, the revised qualifying cut-off is 7th, 5th, and 0th percentile, respectively. Therefore, the revised cut-off score after lowering the cut-off percentile is 103 for General/EWS, 90 for General PwBD, and -40 for SC/ST/OBC(Including PwBD of SC/ST/OBC) categories, respectively.

Following this, the Union Government told the Supreme Court that NEET PG is not an entry-level examination like MBBS and that candidates appearing for it are already qualified doctors. It defended its decision, stating that NEET-PG does not certify minimum competence, which is established by the MBBS qualification, but is merely a filtering mechanism for allocation of limited postgraduate seats.

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