Good morning. If you’re preparing for NEET-PG, or teach the residents who got in this year, the lead is about your scorecard. ENT’s Round 2 numbers follow, with nine more branches. Last comes the air: Delhi is arguing over water sprayed around its pollution monitors, while India’s worst reading on Wednesday night came from the town where I work. One question before you scroll: should NEET-PG have a minimum score? Reply yes or no.
— DR. ADITYA SETH, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
01 · THE LEAD
NEET-PG
NEET-PG let minus 40 qualify. The proposed fix is to stop publishing percentiles.
In January, with thousands of PG seats empty after two counselling rounds, the Health Ministry had the NEET-PG 2025 qualifying bar lowered. General and EWS candidates went from needing 276 out of 800 to 103. For SC, ST and OBC candidates it went to the 0th percentile, which is no bar at all: every one of them who sat the paper qualified, down to minus 40. For scale, a blank answer sheet scores zero, and guessing every answer averages about plus 50. Round 3 then put a minus 12 into MD Physiology, a minus 8 and a minus 5 into Biochemistry, and a 4 into MS Orthopaedics.
The fix, proposed by NBEMS and approved in principle by NMC, is to publish ranks and no percentile, since nobody can cut a percentile that doesn’t exist. The 12-member panel set up at the Supreme Court’s suggestion put it before the court on Tuesday. Its report says candidates with “grossly inadequate or negative performance” shouldn’t qualify, a firm sentence with no number attached. Nor does it say plainly whether marks stay on the result; without them, rank 2,30,087 is just a long number, and nobody would know it was the minus 12. The plan for the non-clinical seats that keep going empty starts with the usual suspect: fees.
WHY IT MATTERS
Nothing changes this counselling season: the percentile rules apply until NMC notifies new ones.
NMC will put out a draft for comments first, so if you want a minimum score, or don’t, that is when to say so.
The panel also wants KYC or biometric checks in counselling, so nobody can hold a seat they never meant to join.
02 · NEET PG ROUND 2
ENT’s best taker this year ranked 1,522. Its Round 1 cut-off has nearly caught last year’s final.
Nobody in the top 1,000 chose ENT; of the ten branches we have checked, none waited longer for its first taker (Anaesthesia’s came at 503). Government MS Open seats ran out at rank 20,996 in Round 1, 93 ranks short of where Round 2 left them last year, and SC and ST have already gone deeper than last year’s finish. Round 2 is when seats come back: last year, six in ten government MS allottees let their Round 1 ENT seat go. Registration closes at noon on 11 November, and the piece works out where each category could close.
The other nine, ordered by the best rank that chose each: Medicine · Radiology · Dermatology · Orthopaedics · OBGY · Paediatrics · Surgery · Ophthalmology · Anaesthesia. Or start with all branches.
03 · AIR QUALITY
AAP seeks criminal action over water sprayed around a Delhi air monitor. Last winter, the environment minister called the stations tamper-proof.
The monitor sits inside the ITI campus at Jahangirpuri, one of Delhi’s most polluted pockets, and videos of it being sprayed went up on Tuesday. On Wednesday, AAP’s Delhi chief Saurabh Bharadwaj asked the Central Pollution Control Board and the Commission for Air Quality Management to investigate, naming Chief Minister Rekha Gupta and Environment Minister Manjinder Singh Sirsa. When AAP made the same charge then, the government called the spraying routine dust control done across the city, and the CPCB chairman said the automated stations leave no scope for human manipulation.
His case rests on patients: asthmatics, people with COPD, pregnant women and older people plan their day around these readings, and a falsely low one tells them it is safe to go out. Whatever Delhi’s monitors read, the chart below has Karnal, where I work, at the top.
|
AQI · WED 4 NOV, 10:51 PM Seven of India’s eight worst readings came from Haryana and Punjab. Delhi, at 434, was the worst metro and still missed the top eight. AQI.in puts Karnal at 30 times above standard.
Next came Rewari 597 and Patiala 569, then Hapur, Uttar Pradesh, at 534. Other metros: Ahmedabad 189, Pune 172, Mumbai 170, Kolkata 168, Chennai 105, Bengaluru 89, Hyderabad 56. Past 300, the scale reads Hazardous. At that level the US EPA advises everyone to avoid outdoor exertion, and people with heart or lung disease, older adults and children to stay indoors. Ahmedabad, Pune, Mumbai and Kolkata sat in the 151 to 200 band the EPA labels Unhealthy. Readings are US-scale AQI from AQI.in’s live ranking, so they won’t match India’s CPCB index, which stops at 500. |
What did you think of today's email?
Built by doctors. Read by doctors.
Know a colleague who should be reading this? Forward this email to them.
Forwarded this issue? Subscribe free →