Imagine visiting a specialist doctor. You trust them. You believe they earned their place through years of hard work and rigorous testing. Now imagine finding out that the doctor who treated you had scored just 9 out of 800 marks on the exam that was supposed to prove their competence. That is not a hypothetical. That is what happened in Chennai, and it should alarm every one of us.
A doctor in Tamil Nadu was recently allotted a postgraduate medical seat, a seat that trains a regular doctor to become a specialist after scoring only 9 marks out of a possible 800 in the NEET PG examination. The seat was granted under what is called the "management quota," a system where private colleges fill a portion of their seats outside the usual merit-based process. The state selection committee handed out this seat during the third round of counselling for the 2025–26 academic session.
This was not an out-of-the-way case. At least 21 doctors with scores below 100 were allotted postgraduate seats in that same round. Under the government quota, a candidate with 42 marks secured a seat in Community Medicine. Another with 71 marks got into Forensic Medicine. These are not numbers from a rough draft; these are the actual scores of doctors who will now go on to train as specialists.
How did it come to this?
To understand how a score of 9 can open the door to specialist medical training, you need to understand two things: how the NEET PG system works, and why thousands of seats are going empty every year.
NEET PG is a computer-based exam with 200 multiple-choice questions, each worth four marks. A wrong answer costs you one mark. The total is 800. Until recently, the minimum score needed to even qualify for counselling was a reasonable number. But this year, the National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences slashed the qualifying cut-off to just 103 marks for general category candidates and to minus 40 for SC, ST, and OBC candidates. Yes, you read that right. A negative score can still qualify a candidate.
Why? Because over 9,000 postgraduate seats across India are sitting empty. Private medical colleges in particular are struggling to fill their seats, especially in less popular subjects like Pharmacology, Community Medicine, and Forensic Medicine. Rather than let those seats remain vacant, authorities keep lowering the bar. The logic is understandable on paper, as empty seats are a waste of resources. But the solution of filling them with near-zero scorers is not a solution at all.
The management quota problem
There is another problem with the management quota, which makes all of this worse. Private medical colleges are allowed to fill a chunk of their seats through this route, which essentially bypasses merit-based selection. When those seats go unfilled even after merit-based rounds, they get offered to anyone still standing regardless of their score. This is how a 9-mark score becomes enough.
The management quota was created to give private institutions some flexibility in funding their operations. In practice, it has become a backdoor that undermines the very purpose of having a competitive exam in the first place. When students know a fallback exists, the urgency to score well naturally weakens. Why push for 400 marks when 9 might eventually be enough?
Why this matters beyond the headlines
This is not just a story about numbers. It is a story about the doctors who will treat our parents, our children, and ourselves. Specialist doctors like cardiologists, gynaecologists, and surgeons are trusted to handle the most complicated and life-threatening situations in medicine. The training they receive during their postgraduate years shapes the kind of doctors they become. If the people entering that training were barely able to demonstrate basic medical knowledge on a standardised exam, the consequences will eventually be felt by patients who never heard of NEET PG and never asked to be part of this experiment.
The Indian Medical Association has already raised its voice. Senior doctors have called this a dangerous precedent. They are right, but raising a voice is not enough.
What needs to change
The government cannot keep using seat-filling as the goal of medical admissions policy. Empty seats are a symptom of poor infrastructure, unattractive specialisations, and financial burdens that push deserving students away from certain colleges or subjects. These need to be addressed directly, not papered over by eliminating minimum score requirements.
The exam structure also deserves a serious look. If top NEET UG scorers are consistently failing to perform well in NEET PG, that tells us something is broken in the middle in how medical colleges teach, how students are assessed during their MBBS years, and how the postgraduate exam is designed.
Merit in medicine is not a bureaucratic formality. It is the foundation on which every patient's trust rests. When that foundation is quietly hollowed out one lowered cut-off at a time, then the cost will not be counted in headlines. It will be counted in hospitals.
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