The illusion of order: Why counselling is not the cure

If you ever believed that cracking NEET was the hardest part of becoming a doctor in India, think again.

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For thousands of aspirants each year, the real trauma begins after the exam—when they enter the bureaucratic labyrinth called counselling. It is here that dreams are stalled, manipulated or lost altogether—not because students lack merit, but because the system lacks logic.

Nowhere is this dysfunction more apparent than in NEET-PG, where despite hundreds of thousands of postgraduate aspirants, thousands of seats remain vacant. In 2022 alone, more than 4,000 PG seats remained unfulfilled after the final rounds—despite a shortfall of specialists in India’s public hospitals. Why? Because of a sly, semi-legal practice called seat blocking. It works like this: High-ranking candidates secure a seat in Round 1 of counselling—not because they want it, but because they can. They then wait for a more desirable seat—perhaps in a state quota, under an NRI category, or even in another private institution offering them “sponsorship”. When that better option materialises, they abandon the first seat — often at the last minute—leaving it vacant and unusable for others. It’s not just unethical; it’s an opportunistic abuse of the system, enabled by regulatory delays and poor digital infrastructure. As we discussed at length in Chapter 10, PG seat blocking has spawned an underground economy. Coaching agents and intermediaries orchestrate this seat manipulation, holding clinical seats in top private colleges like chips in a poker game. In mop-up rounds, they ‘release’ these blocked seats to lower-ranked students—sometimes in return for hefty under-the-table payments.

Meanwhile, genuinely deserving candidates are left with nothing but frustration and heartbreak.

NEET-UG: Cleaner Surface, Cracked Core