NMC Plans to Do Away with Physical Counselling for Medical Admissions From This Year: Report

New Delhi: The National Medical Commission (NMC) is planning to streamline the medical admission process by doing away with 'physical counselling' of students aspiring to get into medical colleges, Mint has reported.

NMC is planning to make it mandatory for medical colleges to conduct online counselling for admissions to ensure that students with low ranks do not secure admissions to medical colleges by a hefty amount of donation.

Confirming this, an official aware of the matter told Live Mint, "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."

The Daily has reported that after the conduction of the NEET UG and PG exams, many unscrupulous 'agents' gather outside the examination centres and fetch students' data from their own sources, and make underhand offers to admit them to medical colleges through physical counselling.

Also Read: NMC says No to Physical Mode, directs states to arrange online NEET PG Counselling for all rounds including Stray Vacancy Round in Private Medical Colleges

As per Sections 14 and 15 of the NMC Act, 2019, NMC has the authority to regulate the manner of conducting the counselling for admission to MBBS and post-graduate medical seats in all the medical institutes. This year, NMC has decided to do away with the physical counselling to put a stop to the practice of admitting low-scoring students to medical colleges by paying hefty donations.

In this regard, the official informed Mint, "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."

Meanwhile, the UG and PG medical counselling process are scheduled to commence in the months of August and September respectively. NMC has asked the medical colleges to declare the total number of undergraduate and postgraduate seats on the official website of the Commission.

Commenting on the matter, the official added, "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."

Further, aiming to make the process of applying to multiple colleges easier, the Commission plans to hold a centralized national-level counselling for private medical colleges instead of a different application for each State. Generally, the candidates have to apply to multiple colleges by paying a minimum fee of Rs 2 lakh each.

Referring to this, the official informed Mint, "This practice is used to exploit students financially".

Medical Dialogues had last year reported that aiming to streamline the counselling process for admission to medical seats and improve the transparency in seat reporting NMC had written to all the State Medical Counselling Committees and informed that from the next academic year, the feeding of data in the seat matrix would be done by each State Counselling Committees (SCC) along with MCC, DGHS instead of colleges/universities.

For this purpose, the Commission had also asked the medical colleges to nominate a nodal officer and it had earlier clarified that from the academic year 2024-2025, the college/university authorities would no longer be allowed to enter data regarding the number of available medical seats for admission.

Last year, NMC Postgraduate Medical Education Board (PGMEB) had clarified that the State and Centre counselling agencies would fill up the seats in all medical institutes through online counselling.

Clarifying that the mode of counselling will be online even for the stray vacany round in Private Medical Colleges from this academic year, NMC PG Board had further mentioned that no college/institute should conduct the counselling, including the stray vacancy round, in physical mode.

Also Read: NMC streamlines Medical Admissions: State Counselling Committees to now enter data on available seats, not medical colleges