TN medical officers move SC seeking order modification on 151 NEET SS inservice seats
New Delhi: Following the Supreme Court direction to surrender 151 vacant super speciality seats to the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) for the second round of All India Quota NEET SS 2025 counselling, the Tamil Nadu Medical Officers have approached the apex court seeking a modification of its order.
The Tamil Nadu Medical Officers Association has 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.
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.
The Apex Court also ordered that the second round of NEET SS counselling should be conducted using the existing qualifying percentile, clarifying that if the qualifying percentile is reduced after the second round, 50% of such seats will be returned to the Tamil Nadu government, while the remaining 50% will be filled by the DGHS through subsequent rounds of counselling.
Contesting this part of the order, the Tamil Nadu Medical Officers Association has filed an interlocutory application seeking its modification. The application has been filed in the pending writ petition concerning 151 unfilled super specialty seats earmarked for in-service candidates in Tamil Nadu. According to the petitioners, these seats form part of the State's 50% reservation for in-service doctors under G.O. Ms. No. 462 dated November 7, 2020, a policy whose constitutional validity was upheld by the Supreme Court in Tamil Nadu Medical Officers Association v. Union of India (2021).
Live Law has reported that the Association argued that the 151 seats belong exclusively to the State's in-service quota and that the DGHS receives such seats only under a temporary arrangement envisaged in N. Karthikeyan & Ors. v. State of Tamil Nadu, to prevent wastage of seats where no eligible in-service candidate is available.
In the plea, the association stated that DGHS does not require any right, title or lien over the in-service seats. It stated that various precedents have been cited, such as that in academic session 2024-25 where all 58 seats which remained after the second round of the All India Quota counselling were returned to the State.
"The direction in paragraph 4, to the extent it retains 50% of the unfilled seats with the DGHS, is thus a departure from the settled and uniform practice followed in all the years since this counselling arrangement has been in operation," as stated in the application.
As a limited prayer, it has been sought that the order in paragraph 4 to be modified to direct that the counselling shall be conducted on the same percentile and if, after the second round of counselling, a decision is to be taken to reduce the percentile, then the remaining unfilled seats shall be reverted in their entirety to the State of Tamil Nadu to be filled up by eligible in-service candidates as per the 2020 G.O.
The matter follows earlier proceedings in which the Supreme Court, in June, allowed the vacant seats to be filled through the All India Merit List. The present application also seeks permission for eligible in-service candidates in Tamil Nadu to compete for these seats in the third round or mop-up round of counselling if the qualifying percentile is lowered after the second round.
Meanwhile, the Medical Counselling Committee (MCC) on July 3, 2026 informed candidates that vacant in-service super-speciality seats from Tamil Nadu have been added to Round 2 of the NEET SS Counselling 2025 following their reversion to the All India counselling pool in compliance with the Supreme Court’s order dated July 28, 2026. Candidates can now exercise choices for these newly added seats, while those seeking to resign their Round 1 allotment may do so without forfeiture of the security deposit until 6:00 PM today, i.e. August 4, 2026.
