Counselling for med seat admissions on Aug 1

Panaji: The directorate of technical education (DTE) is set to declare its merit list for admissions to NEET-based programme seats on July 30. Counselling for the seats will begin on Aug 1, officials said.

“Counselling will be held for medicine, dentistry, nursing, and allied health programmes. For ayurveda and homeopathy seats, the counselling schedule will be declared when the respective council declares their admission schedules,” said an official.

There are around 170 state quota MBBS seats in Goa.

“The eligibility list will be declared by July 24 and the merit list by July 30 for NEET-based programmes. Admissions for pharmacy seats too will be held along with the medicine seat admissions as the NEET scores have come now. Pharmacy seat admissions are done either on the NEET score or the JEE Main score — whichever is higher — in physics and chemistry,” the official said.

The first round of engineering seat admissions was completed, and the second round is expected to be held in Aug. Around 450 of 1,700 seats went vacant after the first admission round.

“Vacancies have been observed after the economically backward sections (EWS) quota was introduced. Before the quota, there were around 1,200 engineering seats in the state, of which around 1,100 would be filled. After the quota seats were added, a similar number of seats have been getting filled, but the additional ones are going vacant,” said an official.

As has been the trend in recent years, the directorate has proposed to state govt to relax the JEE criteria in the subsequent engineering admission rounds to allow the vacant seats to be filled.

“Even after relaxing the criteria, just around 50 more seats are seen to be getting filled in subsequent rounds. Relaxing JEE criteria allows any student with 45% marks in physics, chemistry, and maths in Class XII to apply for an engineering seat, even if he or she has not appeared for the JEE for some reason,” said the official.

Most of the vacant seats are at the state’s private engineering colleges, while those at the govt-run Goa Engineering College have mostly been taken.