New Delhi, Jan. 14 -- With over 18,000 postgraduate medical seats vacant and hospitals facing a shortage of specialists, the National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences (NBEMS) has moved to prevent a costly waste of training capacity. After the second round of NEET-PG 2025 counselling for seats sought by qualified doctors, the regulator "significantly" lowered the cut-off marks to ensure that thousands of seats across 541 government and private medical colleges are filled, according to two officials familiar with the decision.

The scale of the cutoff lowering announced on Wednesday is big. "To ensure these seats do not go unfilled, the eligibility percentile for the unreserved (UR) category was reduced from 50 to 7, while for SC, ...