'No common counselling for medical and dental admissions in 2023'

CHENNAI: The Centre has confirmed there will be no common counselling for medical and dental admissions during the 2023 admissions, health minister Ma Subramanian said.
This means the state selection committee under the directorate of medical education can admit students to the 85% state quota seats in state-run medical colleges and all seats in self-financing colleges and private universities.
In March, director general of health services Dr Atul Goel in a letter to the Tamil Nadu health secretary P Senthil Kumar and director of medical education Dr R Shanthi Malar said the common counselling will be conducted by the medical counselling committee for all seats in the government, private and deemed institutions across the country.
"Our health secretary wrote back stating that this will infringe on the rights of the state. We have received a reply from the Centre stating there will be no changes in the counselling process," he said.
The centre's committee conducts counselling for all seats in AIIMS colleges and JIPMER, central and deemed universities, and 15% of seats in state-run medical colleges surrendered by the states for admissions under the All-India Quota (AIQ). This year, they proposed to simplify the counselling process and to bring down vacancies for all undergraduate and postgraduate seats.
In 2021-22, at least 187 of the 92,0965 MBBS seats were vacant. The following year, 292 of 96,077 seats were vacant. However, the centre promised it will follow the state reservation rules including in-service and domicile requirements.
The state counselling, the minister said, will begin soon after the first phase of all India counselling is completed.