By P. SESH KUMAR
A growing trend of lowering qualifying thresholds—from NEET-PG and IIT admissions to teacher recruitment—raises uncomfortable questions about whether India is prioritising seat occupancy over competence.
New Delhi, July 2, 2026 — A Dainik Bhaskar investigation out of Kota (Rajasthan) has assembled, in one unsettling column, a portrait of an examination state that has stopped asking candidates to clear a bar and started lowering the bar to meet the candidates. A postgraduate medical aspirant who scored minus forty out of eight hundred is now eligible to train as a specialist; a school-leaver who scored 3.65 percent in one subject can find a place on an IIT rank list; a teacher-trainee with a zero can walk into a Bachelor’s in Education (B.Ed seat). The same pages record the photographic negative of this phenomenon-recruitments where a perfectly reasonable forty-percent floor was retained and a hundred percent of the seats stayed empty.
The spectacle, laid out in a single column
The Bhaskar investigation reads less like reportage than like an indictment read into the record. Over the last three admission and recruitment cycles, it notes, candidates with minus marks have been selected as veterinary officers and as Class-IV employees; aspirants at the zero percentile are now eligible for postgraduate medicine; and those who scored a flat zero in the state’s pre-teacher-education test (PTET) will nonetheless proceed to a B.Ed. In the Rajasthan veterinary officer recruitment of 2026- eleven hundred posts, the written paper held on 19 April 2026- the absence of any minimum-marks requirement meant the commission shortlisted negative-scoring candidates in a special-category quota, with one cut-off reported at minus 11.74.
In the 2024 Rajasthan Administrative Service result, declared in April 2026 for some 1,096 posts, the topper is recorded at a mere 39.06 percent and the last selected candidate at around twelve percent. When, by contrast, an assistant-professor recruitment in Sanskrit insisted on a forty-percent floor, not a single candidate cleared it and every seat lay vacant; an assistant prosecution officer drive saw four candidates pass out of 181 posts and 177 go empty; a computer-instructor recruitment lost 2,793 and 247 posts to the same forty-percent rule.
This is the paradox the column captures without quite naming: the only recruitments that produced empty chairs were the ones that kept a standard. Everywhere the standard was dropped, the chairs filled. The state, in other words, has discovered that it can always fill a seat -provided it is willing to stop asking what the person in it knows.
How a cut-off collapses to zero-the mechanics, and the rationale offered for them
Two quite different things are happening here, and the public conversation tends to blur them.
The first is a genuine artefact of statistics. A percentile is a ranking, not a quantity of knowledge; the fiftieth percentile means only that one has done better than half the field, whatever the field’s absolute performance. When a paper is set unusually hard, raw scores compress downward across the board, and a fixed percentile can correspond to an alarmingly low raw mark. This is the technically defensible kernel inside the medical-education furore of early 2026.
The National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences (NBEMS) acting with the Union Health Ministry, issued a notice on 13 January 2026 lowering the NEET-PG qualifying percentiles to fill more than eighteen thousand seats left vacant after two counselling rounds: the general and Economically Weaker Section (EWS) bar fell from the fiftieth percentile to the seventh, and the reserved-category bar fell to the zeroth. The corresponding raw cut-off scores, out of eight hundred, dropped to 103, 90 and minus 40 respectively, against earlier scores of 276, 255 and 235. A candidate who answered enough questions wrongly to finish on a negative aggregate had, on paper, become eligible to specialise.
The second mechanism has nothing to do with statistics and everything to do with arithmetic of supply. There are seats; there are bonds, salaries and infrastructure resting on those seats being occupied; therefore the seats must be filled. The advocate for the doctors who challenged the NEET-PG reduction in the Supreme Court put the causation bluntly, attributing the collapse to the proliferation of private colleges with seats they must sell and fill.
This is the seat-filling imperative, and it is the engine that the percentile statistics merely dress in respectable clothing. It is worth remembering that 2026 was not the first time the medical cut-off was driven to the floor: in 2023 the qualifying percentile for NEET-PG counselling was reduced to zero across all categories, the score bar falling to nil from 291 and 257. What looks like an emergency is by now a habit.
The engineering side shows the same logic in a gentler register. JEE Advanced has always set very low minimum per-subject and aggregate thresholds for inclusion in the rank list- reserved-category per-subject minimums in the low single digits of a percentage- precisely so that the list is populated; the Bhaskar column’s “3.65 percent in one subject” sits comfortably inside that long-standing design.
In 2026, of the 179,694 candidates who sat both papers, some 56,880 qualified for the rank list; the general-category aggregate bar was 92 out of 360, about 25.56 percent. The rank list is not the seat, of course-admission still runs through closing ranks- but the principle is identical: the qualifying floor is set low enough that the system never runs short of bodies to allot.
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The defence, taken at its strongest
It would be lazy to treat the people who lowered these bars as villains, and the most honest version of this narrative must put their case as well as they would. Three arguments deserve a fair hearing.
The first is the percentile point already conceded: a negative or near-zero percentile in a brutally hard paper is not proof of an empty head. If the examination compresses everyone’s raw scores, the absolute number attached to a given rank loses its intuitive meaning, and the lay horror at “minus forty” partly reflects a misreading of what the figure measures. The candidate at minus forty and the candidate at seven hundred have both, after all, completed an MBBS and are already licensed to practise medicine; the dispute is over postgraduate specialisation, not over whether they may touch a patient at all.
The second is distributive. Relaxed-cut-off candidates flow overwhelmingly into private and self-financed institutions rather than into the coveted government colleges, where merit cut-offs remain ferocious. A government MBBS can be had for between roughly three and six lakh rupees across the whole course- at AIIMS the tuition is a few thousand rupees a year- whereas a private degree runs from fifty lakh to one and a half crore, and an NRI-quota seat can cross a crore. On this view the relaxed candidate is not stealing a subsidised public seat from a worthier poor student; he is paying a very large sum for a seat that the merit-rich would not have wanted at that price anyway.
The third is institutional survival. With roughly twenty lakh aspirants chasing about one lakh MBBS seats, private colleges have built capacity on the expectation of full enrolment, and a wall of unfilled seats threatens not just a balance sheet but the continued existence of the teaching hospital, its faculty salaries and its clinical services. An empty seat trains no one and treats no one; a filled seat, even by a weaker student, at least keeps the institution alive to train the next, stronger cohort. The forty-percent floor that emptied the Sanskrit and prosecution-officer recruitments is offered as the cautionary tale: a standard nobody can meet protects no one and merely wastes a sanctioned post.
Where the defence breaks down
Each of these arguments is true in its own lane and false the moment it changes lanes.
The percentile defence collapses precisely where it is invoked most insistently-clinical medicine. It is one thing to say a low percentile need not mean ignorance; it is quite another to allot a postgraduate seat in orthopaedics to a candidate who scored four out of eight hundred, or an obstetrics-and-gynaecology seat at a leading Delhi college to one who scored forty-four, both of which the early-2026 counselling produced.
At those depths the statistical defence has nothing left to defend: a single-digit raw score on a multiple-choice paper, even a hard one, is not a compression artefact but an absence of the knowledge the paper exists to test. Medicine is not graded on a curve at the bedside. A patient does not receive a percentile of care; she receives the actual hands and judgement of the actual doctor who matched at minus forty.
The distributive defence- they only buy private seats- quietly concedes the very thing that should worry us. It admits that the gate to a clinical profession has, for a non-trivial slice of entrants, been recoupled from competence to capacity-to-pay.
A system in which the merit-poor-and-cash-rich reliably convert money into a medical degree, while the merit-rich-and-cash-poor are rationed by a ferocious government cut-off, has not solved the quality problem; it has merely arranged for the quality problem to be borne by whichever patients those private graduates eventually treat, which in a single national licence pool is all of us. The degree is legally identical wherever earned; the asymmetry of the entry standard does not stay politely inside the private campus.
The survival defence is the most seductive and the most dangerous, because it smuggles a category error. The purpose of a medical or engineering seat is not to be occupied; it is to produce a competent professional. A bridge does not care whether the engineer who designed it filled a quota; a sepsis does not care whether the resident who missed it kept a college solvent.
Treating “seat utilisation” as the objective function inverts the entire point of professional education. If a sanctioned post cannot be filled by anyone competent, the correct response is to ask why- too many seats, a mis-set paper, a vanishing applicant pool – not to redefine competence downward until the vacancy disappears.
What other systems do instead
The contrast with mature licensing regimes is illuminating, and it turns on a single technical choice: criterion-referencing versus norm-referencing. The United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) sets its passing standard against an absolute, expert-defined level of minimum competence, with the explicit consequence that no predetermined fraction of candidates is guaranteed to pass or to fail-in a bad year, in principle, everyone could fail.
The bar is reviewed roughly every three years and is moved up when the floor of safe practice rises: the Step 2 Clinical Knowledge passing score was lifted from 214 to 218 on 1 July 2025. The board examinations layered on top, set by the same Angoff-style method, likewise fix a minimum competency rather than a target pass rate. The whole architecture is designed so that the standard never bends to the size of the cohort or the number of residency slots that need filling.
Our percentile-anchored cut-offs are, by construction, the opposite. A percentile floor is a norm-referenced device: it asks how a candidate ranks, not what she knows, and so it can always be lowered to admit more people without any new claim that those people are competent. The deepest lesson from abroad is not that other countries are harsher; it is that they have refused to let the qualifying threshold become a clearing price that adjusts to demand. A standard that can fall to zero was never a standard; it was a queue.
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Following the money- the private-college economy
It is impossible to understand the seat-filling imperative without looking at who needs the seats filled and why. The mismatch is structural: about a lakh of MBBS seats against some twenty lakh aspirants, a scarcity that lets private institutions price a degree at fifty lakh to over a crore. When a college has borrowed and built against an expectation of full intake, every empty seat is a financed asset earning nothing, and the pressure to lower the gate is enormous and continuous.
The petitioners before the Supreme Court named this directly, locating the cut-off collapse in the commercial necessity of selling seats in a proliferating private sector. This is why the lesson “private institutions will not survive if their seats stay empty” is true and yet must not be allowed to set admission policy: the survival of a business is a real interest, but it is not the same interest as the production of safe doctors, and when the two are fused the second loses.
The honest reading is that we have, without ever deciding to, allowed the financial viability of private professional education to become an input into the definition of who is qualified to practise. The fee differential is not incidental colour; it is the mechanism. A reform that ignores the economics will keep being overridden by it.
Where, precisely, we are erring
The errors are diagnosable and they are not mysterious. First, we have confused a ranking device with a competence test, and then acted surprised when the ranking device, lowered, admitted incompetence. Second, we have made seat-utilisation an explicit policy goal, so that an empty chair reads as failure and a filled chair as success regardless of who fills it- the exact inversion the Sanskrit and prosecution-officer vacancies should have taught us to resist, except we drew the opposite lesson and blamed the standard rather than the mismatch.
Third, we have over-built capacity, in private medical colleges and in teacher-training seats alike, against demand that has shifted: the Bhaskar column notes that collapsing teacher vacancies have drained the young of any enthusiasm for a B.Ed, which is why a lakh-odd PTET seats now chase a lakh-odd applicants and the cut-off floats down to zero. Fourth, and most subtly, we oscillate incoherently between two failure modes -a forty-percent floor so rigid it empties a recruitment, and a zero-percentile floor so loose it fills one with negatives- without ever doing the harder work of setting an absolute standard at the actual level of minimum competence and then fixing the supply to match it. We keep adjusting the bar to the crowd instead of adjusting the crowd, or the number of seats, to the bar.
Lessons and the way forward
The way out is not a return to performative toughness-a forty-percent rule that empties chairs is no triumph of standards; it is the same planning failure wearing the opposite mask. The way out is to stop treating the qualifying threshold as a shock-absorber for every other thing we have got wrong.
Begin by decoupling the qualifying bar from the seat count. A licensing or qualifying threshold should be set, criterion-referenced and expert-defined, at the level of knowledge below which a person should not be specialising in surgery or designing a structure-and it should hold even if that leaves seats empty, because an empty seat is a planning problem and a dangerous graduate is a public-safety problem, and the two must never be solved with the same lever. Where a hard paper genuinely compresses raw scores, the answer is to fix the paper’s calibration and the absolute minimum-marks rule together, not to abolish the floor.
Can we not treat persistent vacancies as a signal about supply, not a licence to dilute. If postgraduate or B.Ed seats cannot be filled by competent candidates year after year, the rational response is to rationalise capacity- to let over-built private seats contract or repurpose-rather than to keep manufacturing eligibility. The viability of an institution is the institution’s problem to solve through quality and cost, not the regulator’s to solve by lowering the definition of a qualified entrant. A teaching hospital kept alive by minus-forty residents is not, in any sense that matters, alive.
We should confront the fee economy honestly. So long as a scarce, ferociously rationed government track sits beside an abundant, capacity-to-pay private track feeding into one national licence, the entry standard will keep being pulled toward whatever keeps the private track solvent. Expanding genuinely subsidised, merit-rationed public capacity, and regulating private fees and seat numbers as a matter of public-health planning rather than leaving them to clear at scarcity prices, is the only durable way to relieve the pressure that produces the zero cut-off in the first place.
And finally, we can restore the distinction the whole system has lost: the seat exists for the graduate, and the graduate exists for the patient or the public the graduate will serve. Every time we fill a chair by lowering the floor, we have served the chair and forgotten the patient. A country can, it turns out, always find a body to occupy a seat. What it cannot do, by lowering a cut-off, is conjure the knowledge that the seat was built to certify. Minus forty can be made eligible; it cannot be made competent. That is the line the examination state has been quietly crossing, and it is the line a serious reform must redraw.
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