NEET PG 2022 counseling delay: Resident doctor groups threaten additional protests over delay.

After the counselling for NEET-PG 2022 was postponed by the Medical Counselling Committee (MCC), associations of resident doctors have written to the health minister and the Director General of Health Services stating their impending protest. 

In a notice dated August 29, the MCC said it was postponing the counselling to allow the National Medical Commission to issue a Letter of Permission for new post-graduate seats, an inconvenience that has forced resident doctor associations to communicate their intention to protest the matter if a resolution is not reached soon.

Also read: NEET PG 2022 Counseling is likely to start from this date.

Last December, resident doctors from medical college hospitals across India went on strike to demand the government expedite NEET-PG 2021 counseling. The counseling process only began in February this year, 8-10 weeks later than the MBBS students had demanded. They had requested that the PG examination for 2022 be delayed by this amount of time as it had been scheduled for soon after the previous year’s counselling.

The health ministry did not agree to delay the exams, saying that authorities were trying to regularize the batches that were delayed because of the pandemic. The exams were conducted as scheduled on May 21 and the results were announced within 10 days, but the process of counselling went into an indefinite halt for a long duration, with the NMC releasing a tentative schedule in the first half of August.

“We fail to understand the reasons of such procedural delays… The academic session is already delayed by almost 4-5 months; delaying it further is highly unfavorable not only for medical graduates but also for the health system of the nation,” wrote the Federation of Resident Doctors’ Association (FORDA), which had organized the protest in December, in the letter to the health minister.

The Federation of All India Medical Association (FAIMA) wrote a letter to the Director General of Health Services urging them to “expedite the process of NEET-PG counselling 2022 without further delay and to release the official counselling schedule as soon as possible.” FAIMA was a part of last year’s protest against the delays in the counselling process, and they state that history is about to repeat itself. They go on to say that the authorities are “inciting students to repeat such actions by again delaying the counselling process.”