Hyderabad: Karimnagar TRS MP B. Vinod Kumar has written to Union health minister J.P. Nadda requesting extension of the counselling deadline for Neet-super-speciality courses up to October 17, as more than 500 seats are vacant after the second round of the counselling. He said only 1,141 students had reported to colleges for 1,969 seats for DM/M.Ch. courses. Some petitioners have moved the Supreme Court seeking more time to fill the vacant seats. Dr T. Senthil Nathan, a petitioner and aspirant from Chennai, said, “Advocate Kapil Sibal argued for mop-up counselling for private colleges. In the mop-up counselling, only students who did not get seats in the first two rounds can participate.” He said the vacancies arose as many candidates blocked seats but did not join.
Aspirants from Telangana state had approached the directorate general of health services to conduct counselling or to task the Kaloji Narayana Rao University of Health Sciences and Dr NTR University of Health Sciences with the job. Dr G. Srinivas a superspeciality aspirant, said he had missed the second counselling as he had opted for DM clinical pharmacology which had four seats. “Four students opted for the course, but only one joined. The other three seats are vacant.”
An aspirant said, “It’s time to reform medical education. More than half the seats are lying vacant in Tamil Nadu medical colleges as students feared signing the service bond. We should end the bond system or lose doctors to the US and the UK.” Kaloji Narayana Rao University of Health Sciences Vice-Chancellor Dr Karunakar Reddy0 also supported the idea of a third round of counselling. “It is very painful if so many seats are lying vacant when there is high demand for super-specialists, ” Dr Karunakar Reddy said. He pointed out that the ratio of super-specialists to the population was quite low in India.
