With health officials remaining firm on not tinkering with the existing MBBS fee structure for this academic year, representatives of private medical colleges are understood to have floated the proposal to increase seats under the management quota to 50 per cent to compensate for the ‘loss’ they are going to suffer due to no hike in medical fee.
According to the proposal made by private medical colleges, the management quota seats in medical colleges should be increased to 50 per cent from the existing 40 per cent, which means, the share of medical seats for convenor quota (meritorious) will now be 50 per cent from the existing 60 per cent.
On Monday, top health officials including Vice-Chancellor, Dr. NTR University of Health Sciences, Ravi Raju; Principal Secretary, Health and Medical, Suresh Chandra and others held talks to sort out the issue. So far, after the meeting, it is learnt that no decision has been taken on the issue of increasing the medical seat ratio under management quota in private medical colleges. The proposal to increase the management quota medical seats by 10 per cent will have a big impact on meritorious aspirants in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh because the percentage of medical seats under the convenor quota will be reduced.
In Telangana, there are five State-run medical colleges with 850 seats, 12 non-minority medical colleges with 1,700 seats and the three minority medical colleges with a total of 400 seats. While health officials from TS and AP have more or less decided to hold medical counselling from Monday, August 25, the aspirants, however, continue to remain on the edge because of the delay in announcing the dates and also finalising the medical fee issue. According to the Supreme Court’s order issued this June, the academic sessions for 2014-15 should begin by September 1 and the last date to fill seats is September 30, health officials said.
