With the Governor giving his assent to the Bill that provides 7.5% horizontal reservation for government school students in undergraduate MBBS admissions, a gazette notification is expected to be issued for the same by Friday night.
Publication in the government gazette is usually considered sufficient to comply with the legal requirements for public notice. The government will also have to notify the day from which it will become effective, and that will probably be done on Saturday, Health Secretary J. Radhakrishnan said. “We have put together several elements of a prospectus, but we are waiting for legal vetting before it can be finalised and released to the public,” he added.
While the exact calculation for this year is yet to be revealed by the government, it can be said, at this stage, with the available seat matrix from the last year (2019-2020), that a minimum of 303 seats will be available under the reservation.
In the MBBS course in government medical colleges, 15% seats are set aside for the All-India Quota (AIQ) and the remaining 85% is available in the State quota (SQ), following the rule of reservation. So, in the 23 government medical colleges, where the total number of seats are 3,250, AIQ seats will number 506, leaving the State with 2,744 seats.
A further 127 seats will come to the State’s kitty from Rajah Muthiah Medical College, 65 from ESIC, K.K. Nagar, and 55 from IRT, Perundurai. In private self-financing colleges, 65% seats will be given to SQ, and 50% seats in private self-financing minority colleges will go to SQ. Based on this, SQ will get a total of 1,052 seats from 14 self-financing colleges. This tots up to 4,043, and 7.5% of that is 303. The seat matrix for this year will be different, but this number is likely to go up, because 3,400 seats are now available in the newly-established government medical colleges, and the final position on self-financing colleges is not yet clear.
Since 2017, with NEET in place, only 14 students from government schools have got MBBS seats — 9 in government medical colleges and 5 in self-financing medical colleges — according to official data.
Dr. Radhakrishnan reiterated that the integrity of the 69% reservation would not be affected. “It will neither increase nor decrease,” he added.
