Supreme court tells centre to create insitutional mechanism to address recurring NEET PG cutoff issues

New Delhi: While hearing a PIL challenging the sharp reduction in qualifying cut-off percentiles for NEET PG 2025, the Supreme Court of India held that the issue of lowering cut-offs keeps repeating every year and needs a permanent institutional mechanism rather than a temporary solution.

Observing that ongoing counselling, delayed academic sessions, and last-minute changes create problems for candidates, the Division Bench comprising Justice P S Narasimha and Justice Alok Aradhe suggested that the government consider constituting a committee to conduct an audit of performance and examine why the issue arises year after year.

In addition to this, the apex court asked the Centre and the Ministry to create a working institution to examine why the problems are repeating and arrive at solutions, along with a mechanism for enforcement.

The plea before the court challenges a January 13, 2026, notice issued by the National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences, which reduced qualifying percentiles in the third round of NEET-PG 2025-26 counselling.

Medical Dialogues had reported that 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.

During the recent hearing, the Court noted that the issue of lowering cut-offs and resulting complications in counselling has been happening every year. Reduction of qualifying percentiles has been resorted to in previous NEET-PG admission cycles.

"This is happening every year that the academic sessions go on, counselling continues, and young people face a lot of trouble while a large number of seats remain unfilled. Perhaps the system needs to be tweaked. The method needs to be institutionalised", said the court.

Highlighting the recurring nature of the issue, the Court suggested that the Centre consider setting up a committee to study why such situations arise every year and come up with institutional mechanisms to address the issue permanently, reports LIve Law

It pointed out that such issues are repeatedly discussed in court and then fade away, noting that considerable time and public money are being spent on litigation around the issue. It noted that once such an institutional mechanism is in place and functions in real time, courts may not need to interfere.

The matter has now been listed for further hearing after two weeks.

Previously, 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.

On this, the Apex Court in its previous judgement had observed that while the Union's position that NEET-PG is distinct from entry into MBBS is valid, the impact of drastically reducing the cut-off, “virtually bringing it to zero,” would still need to be examined, particularly in the context of maintaining standards.

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