No PG medical seat has been blocked in Telangana, say officials

Hyderabad: Senior health officials on Friday assured the medicos that not a single post-graduate medical seat in Telangana has been blocked and none of the seats were handed over to managements of private medical colleges to fill on their own. Director of Medical Education, Dr K Ramesh Reddy and Vice-Chancellor, Kaloji Narayana Rao University of […]

Hyderabad: Senior health officials on Friday assured the medicos that not a single post-graduate medical seat in Telangana has been blocked and none of the seats were handed over to managements of private medical colleges to fill on their own.

Director of Medical Education, Dr K Ramesh Reddy and Vice-Chancellor, Kaloji Narayana Rao University of Health Sciences (KNRUHS) Dr B Karunakar Reddy on Friday said all the leftover PG medical seats in the management quota of private medical colleges will be filled through multiple rounds of counselling, only after due diligence.

Authorities made it clear that proactive measures taken by the university and State government enabled to quickly identify attempts to block the PG medical seats.

“After the first round of counselling, 14 out-of-state students with very good ranks managed to get PG medical seats allotted to in Telangana. However, four candidates did not claim the seats while 10 candidates joined. Even today, we spoke to the 10 candidates, who are serious about pursing their PG courses,” Dr Karunakar Reddy said.

Later, after reduction of cut-off, fresh round of PG counselling was taken up in which 20 outside students with high ranks bagged PG medical seats. However, out of the 20 students, only four joined while rest of the 16 did not claim their allotted PG medical seat.

“We personally contacted all the 16 candidates and five had emailed to us claiming that their certificates were uploaded for the counselling process without their knowledge. This raised an alarm and we immediately alerted Health Minister, T Harish Rao who in turn directed us to lodge a police complaint. Most of the outside students were from Bihar, Maharashtra and West Bengal,” he said.

To ensure candidates who had bagged a PG medical seat will find it hard to exit it, the government has also decided to hike penalty for exiting the PG medical seat from Rs. 5 lakh to Rs. 20 lakh.

Overall, there are 37 out of state candidates who had bagged PG medical seats in TS and 14 had joined. The remaining candidates were informed by KNRUHS that strict action will be taken if they don’t join their allocated PG medical seats.

“We received response from some of them claiming that the entire counselling process including online certificate verification was done without their knowledge. We are sure that the Telangana police will unearth people who are involved in this,” Dr Ramesh Reddy said.