A woman from a village in Yavatmal district came in with severe abdominal pain, and her ultrasound showed multiple gallbladder stones. Two days later the surgeon removed her gallbladder at his own hospital and left no drain, because, he said afterwards, the operation had gone well. On the seventh day the pain came back. He re-explored her on day 11: six to seven hours, six units of blood, bile sitting in her abdomen. He washed out, placed a drain and closed without a repair, saying the bowel was too oedematous for one. The drain kept filling. He sent her to Nagpur for an ERCP, and the report came back as a total cut-off at the upper third of the common bile duct, possibly with loss of duct tissue.

He did the hepaticojejunostomy himself six weeks later, at the same hospital. Eighteen months of recurrent jaundice and fever followed, and twenty months after the gallbladder came out, a gastroenterology institute in Hyderabad reoperated and left a tube to drain the bile. She filed nearly five years later, with 62 documents and a claim for ₹17.5 lakh. The surgeon denied all of it, and then, eight years into the case and five months before the order, he died. The complaint did not die with him.

Spinal muscular atrophy takes muscle away from a child a little at a time, including the muscle they breathe with. Risdiplam does not cure it. It slows the slide, it is swallowed at home instead of infused in a hospital, and it remains the only approved SMA drug in the country. One bottle lasts about twelve days. At Roche’s launch price that bottle cost ₹6.3 lakh, which put a family buying it privately at ₹60 to ₹70 lakh a year. Kerala has been handing it out free since a year after launch, and 109 children are on it today.

Then Natco’s generic arrived. The state’s technical committee cleared it, the switch happened this month, and at the first dispensing at SAT Hospital in Thiruvananthapuram the bottles carried a sticker reading physicians’ sample, for clinical trials. Parents read it and asked whether their children were being given trial stock. Within days the Opposition had the photograph, and former health ministers were accusing the government of corporatising public health.

The sticker had a dull explanation. The government’s own consignment was late, so officials bought physicians’ sample stock straight from the manufacturer rather than let treatment break for a fortnight. The harder question is the one the parents are actually asking, which is why a drug their child depends on went to market without a human bioequivalence study behind it. There is a reason for that, and it is written into WHO’s own guidance.

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Counted name by name off MCC’s own allotment list: 51 of the 96 top-100 ranks took General Medicine in Round 1 this year, against 46 of 98 last year. It was the most chosen branch in the top 100, the top 500 and the top 1,000, in both years. Round 1 filled 3,176 Medicine seats, 156 more than last time.

Government MD Open closed at 4,703. Hold on to that number, because of what Round 2 did to it last year. In 2025, 1,177 Round 1 Medicine allottees never reported and another 61 surrendered, and the Open closing rank slid from 3,822 all the way to 6,070. The typical college moved 386 ranks deeper.

One caution before you map your own rank onto last year’s pattern. SC and ST Medicine seats have already gone deeper in Round 1 this year than they did after Round 2 in 2025. Open, EWS and OBC have not. Round 2 registration opens on 6 November and the allotment lands on the 14th.

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