Congress politician Jairam Ramesh slammed the government on Tuesday, March 11 for delaying National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test - Postgraduate (NEET-PG) admissions, although results were released in August of last year.
Ramesh wrote on X, "80,000 aspiring medical postgraduates are suffering due to this”.
The National Medical Commission (NMC) is still conducting NEET-PG counselling, leaving thousands of medical aspirants in the dark.
Aside from the distress caused by delayed admissions, another quiet crisis is emerging: overloaded resident doctors coping with overwhelming workloads.
With new postgraduate batches still to come, current residents are working roughly twice as much, leading to tiredness, burnout, and worries about the quality of patient care, The Indian Express reports.
At the same time, delays and changing cut-offs favour private medical institutes, where seats are swiftly filling up, sometimes for excessive costs, while government institutions continue to struggle with a scarcity of junior doctors.
The NEET-PG 2024 examination was rescheduled from June 23 to August 11.
The exam had to be cancelled the night before it was meant to take place, coinciding with persistent concerns about the NEET - Undergraduate (NEET-UG) exam, which had been grappling with paper leaks and other irregularities.
Furthermore, with the NEET-PG 2025 exam planned for June 15 following the 2024 counselling, students studying for the next cycle would face added pressure.
“Every time counselling gets delayed, the resident doctors suffer. We are already short-staffed, and now, without the incoming batch, the workload has become unbearable,” a second-year medical student at a government hospital in Delhi told The Indian Express.
On the other hand, NEET-PG candidates who are waiting for their classes to start are equally frustrated. Many had already gone through months of planning stress, only to be confronted with additional delays.
A NEET-PG aspirant from Dibrugarh, Assam, told The Indian Express, “We have already spent months waiting for the process to start. Some of us left our jobs, stopped practising, and dedicated ourselves entirely to preparation. We are just stuck in limbo with no clarity on when we can begin our PG courses.”
With each delay, the NEET PG cut-off marks drop, giving individuals who did not initially qualify an unfair edge.
While government hospitals suffer from manpower shortages, it appears that private medical institutions would benefit the most from the delay.
Another significant impact of the delay is the disruption of the entire academic schedule, The Indian Express reports.
Late admissions mean that PG courses that should have started in May or June will now be pushed back, disrupting clinical training schedules and research work.
This cycle then repeats, producing additional delays in the next year's intake, resulting in ongoing interruption in medical education.