India is adding NEET PG seats fast: Why are thousands going vacant? – The Times of India

The Centre has recently released fresh figures showing a major expansion in medical education. The Union Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare Anupriya Patel said in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha on March 10 that 43 new medical colleges had been set up for the 2025–26 academic year and 11,682 MBBS seats and 8,967 postgraduate seats had been approved throughout the country. That’s 20,649 seats in total. The postgraduate number, the ministry said, covers seats in AIIMS and other Institutes of National Importance. The response also cited the government’s preferred blueprint for expansion: Link new medical colleges to existing district or referral hospitals and position the exercise as a solution to regional imbalance. A total of 157 medical colleges have been approved via the centrally sponsored scheme at a cost of ₹41,332.41 crore up to now. It has already delivered ₹23,246.10 crore of its share of ₹26,715.84 crore, the ministry noted. That stated priority is known and politically potent: Underserved areas, aspirational districts, spots where the map of medical education has long felt thin.But seat creation is an easy headline. The uncomfortable narrative begins when the glow of the press note wanes. Even as the system keeps adding capacity, it has been struggling to fill a substantial number of postgraduate medical seats. This is not a stray aberration. Rajya Sabha data shows vacant PG seats have persisted in the thousands across years. As a consequence, the NEET PG qualifying percentile had to be cut sharply to keep seats from lying empty.That is the paradox now staring at the system. India is generating the optics of mass expansion, but part of that expansion isn’t attracting takers without constantly lowering the entry threshold. So the real question is no longer how many seats have been created. It is why so many postgraduate medical seats still need to be rescued.

India’s NEET PG seat curve takes a sharp upward turn

Data presented in the Rajya Sabha in February 2026 by Patel shows that the story of postgraduate medical seat expansion over the last five years has not been one of calm, steady growth. It has moved in jolts.

In 2021–22, the increase stood at 4,705 seats. A year later, it dropped sharply to 2,874. It climbed back to 4,713 in 2023–24, slipped again to 4,186 in 2024–25, and then suddenly shot up to 8,416 in 2025–26.That last number changes the texture of the trend. For four years, postgraduate expansion stayed trapped below the 5,000-seat mark, moving forward, then stumbling, then recovering, then losing pace again. Then came 2025–26, and the graph stopped behaving like a cautious line. With 8,416 PG seats added in a single year, the latest figure is not just the highest in the series, it is almost double the previous year’s addition. This is not incremental growth but a visible shift in scale.This is particularly important because the NEET PG story is the more serious end of medical education. While MBBS seats widen entry, PG medical seats strengthen the specialist pipeline. They decide how many trained doctors move into advanced disciplines, teaching roles and higher-end institutional care. So when PG seat expansion suddenly leaps like this, it suggests that the system is trying to push harder at the specialist end, where capacity has historically grown more unevenly.The undergraduate trend, by comparison, looks steadier. UG seat addition stood at 8,790 in 2021–22, fell to 7,398 in 2022–23, rose to 9,652 in 2023–24, dipped to 8,641 in 2024–25, and then climbed to 11,682 in 2025–26. So yes, MBBS expansion remains strong and politically visible. But it is the PG curve this year that really grabs attention. The undergraduate line rises. The postgraduate line lurches and in 2025–26, it lunges.

NEET PG: The problem of increasing seats and rising vacancies

A temporary problem is supposed to leave after making a mess. The issue of vacant seats in India’s postgraduate medical education seems to have unpacked its bags.

For four consecutive academic years, NEET PG seats have remained vacant and the numbers are too large to be dismissed and too consistent to be treated as an exception. The count stood at 3,744 in 2021–22 and worsened to 4,400 in 2022–23. After that, it softened somewhat: 3,028 in 2023–24 and 2,849 in 2024–25. But this recovery is not reassuring in any sense. A system that still leaves nearly three thousand postgraduate seats empty is not battling a stray counselling hiccup. It is revealing a deeper discomfort.The state keeps producing seats but candidates keep refusing a significant chunk of them. The seat exists on paper, but not quite in aspiration. The undergraduate comparison only makes the contrast harsher. UG vacancies were a mere 141 in 2021–22. They spiked to 2,027 in 2022–23, but then fell sharply to 490 in 2023–24 and 380 in 2024–25. The UG curve looks bruised but capable of self-correction. The postgraduate curve, unfortunately, does not. The system here is not merely struggling to fill seats. It is struggling to make enough of them feel worth taking.

Why young doctors are walking past NEET PG seats

The story of vacant PG medical seats is not one of reluctant students. The vacancy trail, according to Dr Rohan Krishnan, Chief Patron of Federation of All India Medical Association (FAIMA), suggests something more serious. He puts it bluntly, “Vacant seats are a symptom of systemic dysfunction, not student apathy.” The dysfunction begins, he argues, with the way seats are being created. “Seats have been added rapidly without ensuring adequate faculty strength, patient load, clinical exposure and teaching infrastructure,” says Krishnan. These are major pain points for postgraduate doctors. The second problem is where many of these seats are located and what kind of institutional life they offer. “Many vacant seats are concentrated in remote or underserved regions and in institutions with erratic stipends, excessive workload, inadequate safety and weak academic culture,” Dr Krishnan observes. “Young doctors are not avoiding service, they are avoiding exploitative and unsafe training environments.”He also points to the deterrent effect of state bond policies. “Long compulsory service periods, financial penalties running into lakhs and unclear enforcement mechanisms deter candidates, especially those from modest backgrounds, from accepting seats that may trap them in prolonged or uncertain obligations,” Krishnan says. Add to these the problems of multiple rounds of counselling, last-minute rule changes, and poor inter-state coordination. “All these result in candidates losing eligibility, seats remaining blocked till late rounds and no practical window for relocation,” he adds.

Bottom line

In the end, the NEET PG vacancy story is not about a few leftover seats after counselling. The problem is not one of dwindling aspiration, but of value creation. Adding more seats to boost higher education in medicine is an achievement for sure, but only if those seats offer the kind of reliability that aspirants find good enough to go for. A seat existing in theory and government documents cannot make it worthwhile. Policymakers need to stop treating the empty PG seats as temporary embarrassment that can be covered up by the easiest shortcut: Percentile reduction. They need to acknowledge and address the hard truths behind this systemic failure to make medical specialization in India a worthy pursuit. Click here for the February 2026 Rajya Sabha data.