CHENNAI: The history of many ‘reforms’ is often the history of power aggrandising itself first invoked as necessity, then defended as inevitability, even when evidence is absent or points the other way.
A striking example is the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) framework NEET-UG, NEET-PG and NEET-Super Speciality (SS) which governs medical admissions across Central and State, public and private institutions alike.
Although NEET predates the National Medical Commission Act, 2019, it now derives statutory support from Section 14 of that Act. It reflects the Union’s misplaced faith in centralisation as a cure for every sectoral malaise, including educational testing. Its proponents nevertheless defend NEET as a transformative reform that replaces multiple entrance tests, standardises merit, enhances transparency, and curbs capitation fees.
The record tells a different story. Between 2021 and 2025, qualifying cut-offs were repeatedly lowered sometimes to the zeroth percentile in NEET-PG and NEET-SS to prevent high-fee private college and deemed-university seats from remaining vacant. A test projected as the guardian of merit has instead become a commercially driven seat-filling ritual.
NEET-UG paper leaks in 2024 and 2026 further exposed the fragility of national testing for 23 lakh-plus candidates. Centralisation magnifies systemic vulnerability by creating a single point of failure.
NEET-UG carries a maximum of 720 marks, with qualifying benchmarks fixed at the 50th percentile for general candidates and 40th percentile for OBC, SC and ST candidates. In practice, these percentiles translate into strikingly low raw scores.
For general-category candidates, the qualifying cut-off was 138 marks in 2021, 117 in 2022, 137 in 2023, 162 in 2024 and 144 in 2025 barely 16 to 23% of the total. For reserved-category candidates, it ranged from 93 to 127 marks, or roughly 13-18%.
This raises a basic question. With qualifying cut-offs so low, why subject 18-year-olds especially rural, poor, vernacular-medium and State Board students to a high-stakes national ordeal that inflicts psychological distress, devalues secondary schooling, entrenches costly big-city coaching, and operates as a class, gender, and geographic filter?
NEET-UG’s academic justification is weaker still. International research shows that one-shot entrance tests are poorer predictors of later academic performance than sustained achievement in School Board examinations. A rigorous Board exam-based threshold, drawing on performances in classes 10, 11 (once introduced) and 12, would assess merit more correctly and fairly than NEET-UG’s nominal qualifying floor. Statistical harmonisation can secure inter-Board comparability without forcing all students through a single high-stakes national test.
Admissions to Union and State government medical colleges, however, operate on an entirely different plane. There, general-category cut-offs routinely exceed 600 and often 650 marks out of 720, reflecting fierce competition for a limited pool of subsidised seats. Tamil Nadu’s 2023 admissions illustrate the gulf.
The national eligibility thresholds were merely 137 marks for general candidates and 107 for OBC, SC and ST candidates. Yet, State-quota cut-offs for government medical colleges were 602 marks for the Open Category, 556 for BC, 530 for MBC and DNC, 448 for SC, and 355 for ST.
Thus, a poor general-category candidate scoring 600 may be denied an affordable government MBBS seat, while a wealthier candidate scoring around 150 may enter a costly private college. The poor must excel; the rich need only qualify.
If NEET-UG raises questions about diluted standards, NEET-PG removes all doubt. Carrying a maximum of 800 marks, its initial general-category cut-off (50th percentile) between 2021 and 2025 ranged from 275 to 302 marks approximately 34-38%. The initial OBC, SC, and ST cut-off (40th percentile) ranged from 235 to 265 marks, or about 29-33%. Even these modest thresholds were sharply lowered during later counselling rounds:
A zeroth percentile threshold makes every otherwise eligible candidate who appeared for the examination eligible for counselling including those scoring zero or even minus 40 out of 800. An exam whose qualifying floor can collapse from the 50th to zeroth percentile cannot credibly be a rigorous measure of merit.
By contrast, government PG seats remain fiercely contested. Depending on the year, institution, and speciality, general-category candidates typically require a minimum of 530 marks for preferred clinical disciplines, over 470 for mid-level clinical and surgical courses, and at least 275 for para-clinical or non-clinical branches.
With qualifying cut-offs so low, why subject 18-year-olds especially rural, poor, vernacular-medium and State Board students to a high-stakes national ordeal that inflicts psychological distress, devalues secondary schooling, entrenches costly big-city coaching, and operates as a class, gender, and geographic filter?
The erosion of standards is starkest in NEET-SS, which should represent the most exacting stage of medical selection, especially when the Supreme Court has ruled out reservations at this level. Yet, the qualifying threshold fell from the 50th percentile to the 35th in 2021, to the 20th in 2022 and the zeroth percentile in both 2023 and 2024. The 2025 position remains unsettled owing to litigation.
NEET is styled an eligibility-cum-entrance test. But eligibility and entrance are distinct concepts. Eligibility determines whether a candidate possesses the minimum academic foundation for advanced study; its threshold must be stable, defensible, and independent of vacancy levels. An entrance test ranks eligible candidates for scarce seats
The Supreme Court has already supplied the principle that should govern this issue. In Dr. Preeti Srivastava v. State of Madhya Pradesh (1999), a Constitution Bench held that minimum qualifying marks directly affect standards in postgraduate medical education. It rejected lowering academic thresholds merely to fill vacancies and ruled that super-speciality admissions must rest solely on merit, without reservation.
In a separate, partly dissenting opinion, Justice SB Majmudar warned that relaxation must not reach a ‘vanishing point’ and that a ‘rock bottom’ must remain. He proposed restricting relaxation for reserved categories to 50% of the general-category benchmark.
Though the case arose in the context of reservation, its logic applies with greater force to vacancy-driven zeroth-percentile cut-offs, even for General-category candidates, in NEET-PG and NEET-SS. In Harisharan Devgan v. Union of India (January 2026), the reduction of NEET-PG 2025 thresholds to the 7th percentile for general and zeroth percentile for reserved candidates has been challenged before the Supreme Court.
NEET’s central defect lies in its compound character. It is styled an eligibility-cum-entrance test. But eligibility and entrance are distinct concepts. Eligibility determines whether a candidate possesses the minimum academic foundation for advanced study; its threshold must be stable, defensible, and independent of vacancy levels. An entrance test ranks eligible candidates for scarce seats.
NEET conflates the two and applies them unevenly. For poor and lower-middle-class candidates competing for limited, subsidised government seats, it operates as a stringent entrance test. For affluent candidates seeking costly private seats, it functions as a loose eligibility test.
The Union Government’s defence in Harisharan Devgan (2026) exposes the contradiction. It argued that NEET-PG does not certify minimum competence, which is already established by the MBBS degree, but merely prepares an inter se merit list for seat allocation.
That contention is untenable because NEET, by its very name, is also an eligibility test. It implies that the MBBS degree alone does not establish eligibility and that NEET-PG is necessary to protect standards. If so, its qualifying threshold cannot be reduced to zero or negative marks. The same contradiction afflicts NEET-SS.
The eligibility and entrance functions must therefore be separated. NEET-UG should be abolished. NEET-PG and NEET-SS, if retained, should serve only to rank candidates for admission and carry no more than 50% weightage, with the balance drawn from university marks, clinical and practical performance, internship assessment and demonstrated professional competence.
Eligibility should rest not on elastic percentiles that fluctuate with vacancies, but on a fixed, non-negotiable raw-score threshold, say, 50% . Unfilled private medical seats should revert to States for merit-cum-reservation allotment at government fee levels. Section 14 of the NMC Act, 2019 should be suitably amended.
NEET-UG should be abolished. NEET-PG and NEET-SS, if retained, should serve only to rank candidates for admission and carry no more than 50% weightage, with the balance drawn from university marks, clinical and practical performance, internship assessment and demonstrated professional competence
Tamil Nadu has mounted a serious challenge to NEET through the Justice AK Rajan Committee Report (2021), successive legislative measures, and Supreme Court proceedings. Yet, its case remains incomplete.
TN has not foregrounded the substantial international evidence that School Board performance predicts college achievement and graduation more reliably than one-shot entrance tests, nor the judicially recognised methods of statistical harmonisation that can secure comparability across Boards and universities without a national examination. It has not effectively used NEET’s own record of collapsing qualifying thresholds to discredit its claim to measure merit, or invoked the reasoning in Dr. Preeti Srivastava (1999), despite its reservation context, against vacancy-driven dilution of qualifying standards. These arguments could decisively strengthen and reframe the State’s case.
Ultimately, a test that burdens the poor, rewards privilege, weakens States, marginalises universities, lowers its own floor to fill private seats, and lacks empirical justification cannot claim to guard merit. NEET’s defects are structural; it demands fundamental reconsideration, not cosmetic reform.
—The author is retired IAS officer of Tamil Nadu cadre, former Vice-Chancellor of Indian Maritime University, Chennai, and Member, High-Level Committee on Union-State Relations constituted by the Government of Tamil Nadu