For the first time, more than 25,000 students from government schools had registered for the free coaching after 300 MBBS seats earmarked for pupils from government institutions under the 7.5 per cent reservation was implemented last October.

However, the number of active participants has now fallen below 3,000 due to various issues including lockdown. A senior official from the School Education Department the number also fell because of the Class 12 board exams.

“As the present online training sessions are not that active due to the decreasing number of students, it has been decided to give innovative training after elections,” he said.

The list of students who are not actively taking part in the coaching session would be taken to find the reason for not showing interest in continuing. Also, feedback from students would be taken into consideration while charting the plan to enhance online coaching, he said.

“Other issues that they face, including not being able to access internet, communication gap between them and trainers, and language barrier, if any, will be taken into account to improve the quality of NEET online classes,” added the official. “In addition, more e-lectures with step by step answers and logical explanations will be uploaded in the upgraded training version, and question bank containing more than 2,000 solutions (presently 1,000) covering State board syllabus for Class 11 and 12 will be made available,” he said.

Physical NEET training sessions would be conducted if the pandemic situation returned to normalcy after elections, he said, adding that more 400 coaching centres have been identified for this. Even if the new session commences from April second week, students would have about three months to prepare for NEET that would be held on August 1, he added.