Medical seat surrender: Minister promises action

‘Will introduce heavy penalty’

Education Minister K. Sudhakar has said that the State Government will take strict measures to avoid private medical colleges benefiting from the surrender of medical seats after three rounds of counselling.

Answering a question from BJP member N. Ravikumar in the Legislative Council, the Minister said exploiting a loophole in law, a few private medical colleges were benefiting from surrender of medical seats. In 2019-20 and 2020-21, a total of 1,227 seats were surrendered. “We will introduce heavy penalty in case of surrender of seats so that the problem does not continue in the coming years,” Mr. Sudhakar said.

Earlier, Mr. Ravikumar said over 1.19 lakh students took the entrance examination for medical seats in the State. Of them, 89,539 were eligible to get seats. As many as 33,650 attended the interview. And, finally only 8,535 students got the seats. “When such is the competition to get medical seats, how come people surrender seats? It is a mafia involving some colleges and students. The colleges inform about the surrender of the seats only at the last hour of the counselling, so that nobody can take them. The government should conduct another round of counselling to fill all the seats,” he said.