Punjab backtracks on MBBS eligibility

Balwant Garg
Tribune News Service
Faridkot, June 7

The Punjab Government has backtracked on a medical admission notification it was to implement from the 2019-20 session to ensure more weightage to state students in MBBS-BDS courses and check the seats going to non-residents. 

Through a notification in March 2016, which came following directions from the Punjab and Haryana High Court in July 2014, the state government had announced that from 2019-20, only those students who had cleared Class X, XI and XII from Punjab would be eligible for the medical courses. 

Though the Class XI, XII criterion existed earlier too, the Class X norm was introduced with immediate effect in 2014 to weed out students of other states who enrolled as dummy candidates in Punjab schools only to be eligible for state quota seats. 

As the 2014 decision rendered a large number of aspirants ineligible since they had not done matriculation from Punjab, they approached the court, which rejected its July 2014 order but allowed its implementation from 2019-20.  The latest notification by the Medical Education Department, issued a day after the NEET results were declared on Wednesday, reverses the 2016 order and says only those who are bona fide residents of Punjab are eligible for state quota seats.

As per the instructions issued by the Punjab Department of Personnel, any student who has studied in Punjab for two years (Class XI and XII) preceding the qualifying examination for the courses would fall in the bona fide category. After the March 2016 notification, many parents had shifted their children to Punjab so they could study Class X-XII from the state to be eligible for admissions. The latest change has now shocked them.

“For the last three years, the Medical Education Department was asking aspirants to proceed as per the 2016 notification and now at the eleventh hour, it has set the order aside,” rued many parents. 

A parent said students from any part of the country were now eligible for state quota seats. “They only have to study in Punjab for two years, which can be done through dummy admission,” he said. Of the 1,125 MBBS seats in Punjab, 75 are filled via all-India quota, 175 through NRI quota and the rest are state quota seats.

Class X ‘not must’

• From 2019-20, those clearing Class X-XII from Punjab were to be eligible for state quota MBBS/BDS seats
• Step was to ensure outsider students who enrolled as dummy candidates in Punjab were kept out
• Punjab Govt had issued this notification in 2016, but it backtracked on Thursday
• Latest order says only domicile students will be eligible, nullifying the Class X norm