Over 1800 NEET SS seats lying vacant: Former TN CM Stalin urges PM Modi to intervene
Chennai: On the issue of around 1800 NEET SS medical seats remaining vacant across the country, DMK president and former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin recently urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to intervene and ensure that the qualifying percentile is reduced to fill the vacant seats.
Stalin raised the issue in a post on X on Friday (September 11), citing a news report. He said the seats were lying vacant because the Union government’s Director General of Health Services (DGHS) had not reduced the qualifying percentile for super-speciality medical admissions. With this, he said that the vacancy also included 40 seats exclusively meant for in-service doctors in Tamil Nadu.
"It is shocking that nearly 1,857 valuable super-speciality medical seats are lying vacant across the country simply because the Union Government’s DGHS has not reduced the qualifying percentile. This includes 40 seats exclusively meant for in-service doctors in Tamil Nadu," he said in the X post.
Referring to a recent Supreme Court order in the Tamil Nadu Medical Officers Association case, Stalin said, "Yesterday, in the Tamil Nadu Medical Officers Association case, the Hon’ble Supreme Court directed that the percentile be reduced. I therefore urge Hon’ble @PMOIndia to intervene immediately and reduce it to zero percentile, as has been done in earlier years. The Union Government must also allow States to independently reduce the percentile for their in-service quota when seats remain vacant. Public health is a constitutional responsibility of the States. Not a single medical seat, a precious national asset, should be allowed to go waste when our people need more specialist doctors."
Also read- NEET SS 2025: SC tells Centre to reconsider cutoff reduction as around 1800 seats remain vacant
Background
Medical Dialogues recently reported that the Supreme Court also expressed concern over the vacancy on September 10 and therefore asked the Union Government to reconsider its decision not to lower the cut-off percentile for the National Eligibility-Entrance Test Super Speciality (NEET SS) seats in the current academic year.
This comes after the Centre informed the Apex Court that the Government was willing to conduct a stray vacancy round without lowering the cut-off because the Centre had faced severe backlash last year for reducing the cut-off percentile to zero for admission to super speciality medical courses.
As a result, the counsel for the Government told the court that the centre has decided not to reduce the cut-off marks this year. It also told the bench that the decision was taken after consultations between all stakeholders, including the Ministry of Health, the Medical Counselling Committee (MCC), and the National Medical Commission (NMC).
At the outset, the counsel for some of the petitioners, Advocate Rashmi Nandakumar, told the bench that around 2,000 seats in medical colleges would remain vacant if there was no reduction in the cut-off percentile.
On the other hand, senior counsel, P Wilson, who appeared on behalf of service doctors in Tamil Nadu, submitted before the Court that around 1,800 super-speciality seats are remaining vacant, including cardiology, neurosurgery and oncology.
The pending legal issue over the 151 vacant super-speciality seats in Tamil Nadu halted the NEET-SS 2025 counselling for months. On July 28, 2026, the Supreme Court of India directed the Tamil Nadu government to revert the unfilled 151 NEET SS seats to the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) by July 29, 2026, and asked the Medical Counselling Committee (MCC) to complete the NEET SS 2025 counselling process within two weeks.
Following the direction issued by the Supreme Court, the Tamil Nadu Medical Officers approached the apex court seeking a modification of its order. The Association had requested the Court to direct that all unfilled in-service super specialty seats should be returned to the State of Tamil Nadu if the qualifying percentile is reduced after the second round of counselling.
After this, the Union Government informed the Supreme Court about its decision to return all unfilled NEET SS 2025 seats to Tamil Nadu, which had been transferred to the All India Quota for counselling. Further, the Additional Solicitor General Aishwarya Bhati had also told a bench of Justice PS Narasimha and Justice Alok Aradhe that the government would also consider reducing the qualifying percentile to help fill the remaining seats.
