E-Paper
Why NRI/Management medical seats in Karnataka are staying vacant
Most of the medical seats under the NRI/management quota in Karnataka stay vacant due to unaffordable fees, data on the Department of Medical Education's website showed.
In a shocking reveal, the Department of Medical Education's (DME) data has showed that a major portion of medical seats under the NRI/management quota have no takers in Karnataka. As many as 72% of the total seats reserved under the NRI/management quota were vacant between 2017 and 2021. These seats were then returned to colleges.
According to a report in a leading daily, the seats go unclaimed during the counselling rounds conducted by the Karnataka Examinations Authority (KEA), due to unaffordable fees. However, of the four quotas available in private medical colleges, government, private, management and NRI, the government and private quota seats are said to get filled up quickly.
That makes up an average of 88% of the total seats and the remaining 12% reserved for NRI/management quota each year see unfilled seats sent back to the college pools. The fees for each seat is reduced once they are sent back to colleges unclaimed.
Students are said to pick seats in the top four to five colleges despite the high fees, however seats in other colleges are usually brought down by a few lakhs at most, reports said. On average, students are forced to pay around Rs. 1.1 crore and Rs. 2.7 crore to complete the four-and-a-half-year course through the NRI/management quota, as the annual fees across colleges is from Rs. 25 lakhs to Rs. 60 lakhs.
| Year | Percentage of seats that remained vacant |
| 2017 | 81% |
| 2018 | 64.5% |
| 2019 | 67.4% |
| 2020 | 83.3% |
| 2021 | 63.2% |
The above table shows an yearly break up of the data from the DME website, displaying how many seats remained vacant per year from the NRI/management quota. The DME's data reportedly showed that over 600 seats from the quota were returned to colleges after the Undergraduate-NEET exam of 2021.
According to the leading daily, colleges have their own arrangement to tackle the vacancies. They would have a list ready beforehand, consisting of willing students who would take these vacant seats. These students had an advantage as they could pay the college fees in cash, whereas they would have had to pay via demand drafts if they went through KEA counselling.
The report added that the KEA requires colleges to upload fees paid by students for the first year on its portal. After the first year, the fees charged by colleges could be bargained, while some private medical colleges also offer package deals if fees are paid upfront.
