The idea that a candidate who scored one mark out of 800 can secure a postgraduate medical seat should not merely raise eyebrows, it should raise blood pressure.
We are told this is an administrative adjustment – a pragmatic solution to fill vacant seats. But there are some vacancies that are better left vacant. An empty chair in a classroom is far less dangerous than an occupied chair in an operating theatre by someone who has demonstrated no demonstrable competence.
Why play with people’s lives?
Lowering the qualifying percentile to near zero – even negative scores in some categories – is not reform. It is surrender. And surrender in medicine is not academic. It is mortal.
Merit on life support
This is worse than cheating. A student who cheats in exams at least acknowledges that marks matter. But what do we call a system that says merit does not matter at all? Is a zero percentile is good enough? That one mark in 800 reflects eligibility to cut open a human body? Reduction of cut-offs to such depths is not dilution; it is evaporation.
Postgraduate medical education is not a correspondence course. It is not a symbolic certificate. It is advanced training in high-risk, split-second decision-making – where hesitation costs limbs and incompetence costs lives.
Would you willingly submit yourself, your child, or your ageing parent to a surgeon who scraped in with one mark?
Lessons from a dark reputation
There was once an urban legend in the 1970s. Employers would reportedly state, bluntly and without apology, that candidates from a certain university need not apply. The reason? Mass copying – brazen, organised, sometimes allegedly enforced with intimidation.
Such was the damage to institutional credibility. That university clawed its way back over decades, through stricter invigilation and restored standards. Reputation, once tarnished, takes years to rebuild.
What reputation will our medical colleges carry if seats are filled not by competence but by convenience? Will hospitals quietly become places where patients pray harder than they consent?
The equality illusion
Some argue that once admitted, all students will be trained equally. The system will shape them into competent doctors. That is comforting fiction.
Medical training demands baseline aptitude. It demands intellectual stamina. It demands discipline. If a student enters with a negative or negligible score, what assurance exists that he will suddenly develop seriousness, dedication, and skill?
Will such candidates diligently attend clinics, master anatomy on cadavers, absorb pharmacology, and refine diagnostic judgement? Or will the same leniency that brought them in quietly carry them through?
Vacancy versus vulnerability
We are told that vacant seats are a loss to the nation. No. An underqualified specialist is a far greater loss. An empty postgraduate seat does not misdiagnose cancer. An empty seat does not mishandle anaesthesia. An empty seat does not falter during a cardiac emergency. But a poorly trained doctor might. Medicine is not an employment scheme. It is a public trust.
Between a scalpel and a prayer
If non-meritorious students share seats with genuinely meritorious ones, what message does that send? Is excellence and indifference are equivalent? Can hard work and zero effort converge at the same destination? Would you consult such a doctor without hesitation?
Faced with that prospect, many might rather seek divine intervention – in a temple, a dargah, a church, or a quiet mandir at home – before entrusting their lives to a system that treats one mark as merit.
Standards are not elitism
This is not about exclusion. It is about protection. Minimum standards in medicine are not acts of discrimination. They are acts of responsibility. When courts once warned that lowering medical standards could ‘wreak havoc on society’, it was not rhetorical flourish, it was foresight.
The consequences of such dilution will not surface immediately. They will appear years later – in misdiagnoses, in avoidable complications, in quiet tragedies that statistics will never fully capture. And by then, it will be too late to raise the cut-off.
