SC to consider plea for fresh counselling for 1,456 vacant PG seats

A bench of justices MR Shah and Aniruddha Bose agreed to consider the plea filed on the basis of information received in a RTI response on Wednesday

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court will consider on Wednesday a plea filed by a set of MBBS doctors seeking a special stray round of counselling for close to 1,456 seats still vacant even after completion of Neet-PG 2021 admission.

The petition cited the RTI response received from the Centre that showed there are 1,456 PG seats that still remain to be filled up across all categories (reserved and unreserved) of seats. (HT Photo)

A bench of justices MR Shah and Aniruddha Bose agreed to consider the matter on Wednesday and told senior advocate Rachna Srivastava and advocate Charu Mathur, appearing for the seven petitioner doctors, to serve a copy of the petition to additional solicitor general (ASG) Aishwarya Bhati before the next hearing.

The petitioners relied on a May 11 response to a right to information request about vacant medical PG seats across government and private medical colleges after completion of mop-up counselling round for All India quota (AIQ) seats and state quota seats on May 7.

According to the RTI response, there are 1,456 PG seats that still remain to be filled up across all categories (reserved and unreserved) of seats.

The petitioners urged the court to direct the Medical Counselling Committee (MCC) to conduct a special stray round of counselling to give a fresh chance to doctors who qualified Neet-PG 2021 but could not get admission after the completion of the mop-up counselling round.

“It is pertinent to note that occupying remaining seats (on the basis of merit) works in the interest of both the college as well as candidates,” the petition said, pointing that the college also incurs a loss for each vacant seat.

The petitioners pointed out that such concessions were made in the past considering the special situation caused by the pandemic in the past two years.

On April 18, 2022, MCC conducted a special stray round of counselling for 323 vacant seats in undergraduate (UG) counselling. “This is a practice that has been followed by MCC previously wherein Special Stray Rounds for UG and PG have been conducted in order to ensure that seats don’t go vacant. However, this wasn’t followed this year,” the petition alleged.

They argued that on May 9, a mop-up counselling round was ordered by the top court in Neet-SS (super speciality) counselling to fill up 940 vacant seats. Following the RTI response on vacant PG seats, the petitioners who were left without a seat approached the top court to seek a fair chance for admission along with similarly-placed candidates.