Good morning. Two stories from the Round 1 allotment list open today’s issue, and if you are filling choices for Round 2, both are worth a second cup of chai. Below them are a dying patient’s chats with ChatGPT and a night from Atul Gawande’s residency.
— DR. ADITYA SETH, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
01 · THE LEAD
EXAMS AND ADMISSIONS
More than 100 EWS candidates were allotted private PG seats in Round 1, all of them in the Open category
On the NEET-PG 2026 Round 1 allotment list, a candidate ranked 79,396 has been given MS Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Padmashree Dr DY Patil Medical College in Navi Mumbai. Nearly 80,000 candidates ranked higher, and in the category column, this one reads EWS.
Another candidate, ranked 71,263 and also listed as EWS, was allotted MD Radio-diagnosis at Raja Rajeswari Medical College in Bengaluru, where three years of tuition costs about ₹1.8 crore. Nothing in the Times of India report on these rows suggests a rule was broken. The list cannot tell you how they will pay.
WHY IT MATTERS
The number to watch is how many EWS candidates still hold these seats when counselling ends on 31 December.
None of the allotments is final: each candidate can keep the seat, try for an upgrade in Round 2, or exit.
Self-financed seats carry no reservation, so these went on rank and on the colleges each candidate chose to list.
02 · HEALTH TECH
Two weeks after she died, her child found her ChatGPT chats. By their account, it had told her she probably had years.
She had stage 4 colon cancer, and every update from home said she was doing really well, so her child, who lived out of state, planned to move back for eight months to a year.
By the time they flew home there were only days left, and nine times out of ten she did not recognise them.
In the chats, the child says, ChatGPT misread her results, told her “terminal doesn’t mean incurable” and, when she asked about telling her child she would die within weeks, said there was no rush. The chats have not been made public. Why she asked a chatbot instead of her doctors, and what to ask your own patients this week.
03 · EXAMS AND ADMISSIONS
OBGY’s last government Open seat went at rank 14,190 in Round 1, deeper than where it closed after Round 2 last year
Last year’s Round 1 closed at 9,714, and Round 2 took it to 11,555. This year’s 14,190 was a single seat in Arunachal Pradesh, though, and half the government Open seats had gone by rank 5,262. Seats also come back: in 2025, 1,063 of the 2,425 candidates allotted OBGY in Round 1 did not keep theirs. Deemed seats, the kind in our lead story, ran to rank 1,24,120.
Which hospitals drew toppers to DNB over government MS, and where each category might close when Round 2 opens on 6 November.
04 · DOCTORS
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Doctors
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Atul Gawande failed his first three central lines. Then came the night his senior refused to take the needle.
Four weeks into surgical training, he watched his chief resident put in a line and was then handed the next one. Our carousel retells what followed, from his book Complications, and more than a thousand people liked it in its first 15 hours. One commenter wrote that their seniors kept pushing until the day they put in three lines back to back. Hit reply and tell me about the senior who handed you the needle.
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