The National Medical Commission (NMC) is planning to end the 'physical counselling' of students seeking medical training, a practice that has been widely abused.
The regulator plans to make it mandatory for medical colleges to offer online admissions counselling, in a bid to end the practice of low-ranking students being admitted by paying high donation fees to colleges.
Sections 14 and 15 of the NMC Act, 2019 empowers the NMC to regulate the mode of counselling for admission to MBBS and postgraduate medical courses in all medical institutions.
'The plan is to make the counseling process more streamlined and efficient'
“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 the academic year 2024-25, all counselling will be conducted online to support the counselling agencies of the state and central government to avoid manual interference,” said an official aware of the matter.
When NEET UG & PG exams are held, many unscrupulous ‘agents’ gather outside the exam centre. They obtain the details of students from their own sources and make underhand offers to get them admitted in medical colleges.
“There will be no admission through physical screening. This will reduce the demand for huge donations and admissions from low-ranking students. Most of the time, students also contact these agents fearing that they will not get admission,” the official added.
The medical support programs for UG and PG are expected to start on August 15 and September respectively.
The medical education regulator has also directed medical colleges to disclose the total number of bachelor's and master's degree programmes on the official website of NMC.
“Earlier, there was confusion over the number of seats available in medical colleges. There have been cases of fake allotment of seats for MBBS courses issued under the alleged signature of secretary, NMC. This led to students and parents falling into the traps of criminals,” the official said.
The plan also includes holding a centralized national counseling for private medical colleges, instead of a separate one for each state. This will in turn save the applicants the pressure of applying to multiple colleges by imposing a minimum fee of ₹two lakh each.
“This practice is used to financially exploit students,” the official said.
The government is trying its best to increase the number of medical colleges and therefore the number of MBBS places.
The Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare, Anupriya Singh Patel, recently informed Rajya Sabha that there has been an 88% increase in medical colleges from 387 before 2014 to 731 now. Further, there has been a 118% increase in MBBS seats from 51,348 before 2014 to 1,12,112 now. There has also been a 133% increase in PG seats from 31,185 before 2014 to 72,627 till July 31.
Questions sent to the spokesperson of the Ministry of Health remained unanswered at the time of going to press.
