The Supreme Court will take up on Monday petitions challenging unusual reduction in qualifying cut-off percentiles for various categories for admission to NEET-PG 2025-26.A Bench led by Justice PS Narasimha – which had on February 6 expressed surprise over unusual reduction in qualifying cut-off percentiles for various categories for admission to NEET-PG 2025-26 — on Friday agreed to hear the matter on February 23 after the petitioners’ counsel mentioned it.Since the Supreme Court has already passed a common order on February 6 in his case along with two related matters, it would be appropriate for his matter to be heard together with the main NEET-PG case, the petitioners’ counsel submitted.The Bench said the matter would be taken up on Monday.“We were stunned to see why this method was adopted. These are all regular doctors… This is about standards. The question is whether those standards are being compromised,” the Court said,” a stunned Bench had said, directing Centre to explain the rationale behind the decision.Under the revised criteria categories for admission to NEET-PG 2025-26, the cut-off score for the General Category and EWS is 103 (down from 276 earlier) while for General PwBD the score was lowered from 255 to 90. For the SC/ST/OBC category, the revised cut-off is minus 40 (earlier 235).The top court had also asked the National Board of Examination in Medical Sciences (NBEMS) to respond to a PIL challenging the decision to lower the qualifying cut-off percentiles for the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test Post Graduate (NEET-PG) examination and posted the matter for hearing after two weeks.”On one hand, we have to see that seats should not get wasted. At the same time, there is pressure that candidates are not coming, so please reduce the cutoff…Then the argument will be that the standards are being lowered and the counter-argument is that seats are going waste. So, somewhere there has to be a balance,” the Bench noted.Additional Solicitor General Aishwarya Bhati had submitted that the case involves postgraduate seats for which all the candidates are doctors.On behalf of petitioners Harisharan Devgan and others, senior counsel Gopal Sankarnarayanan had said that marks cannot be relaxed in PG admissions, except for exceptional reasons and standards needed to be stricter at the postgraduate level.”The applicable regulation clearly provides that the minimum qualifying standard is the 50th percentile, which is to be determined with reference to the highest marks obtained. You can’t go all the way down to minus 40 percentile,” Sankaranarayanan had submitted.The top court had earlier asked the Union of India, the NBEMS, the National Medical Commission and others to respond to the petition that said the decision to allow candidates with no demonstrable merit to become eligible for postgraduate medical admissions was arbitrary.As over 18,000 postgraduate medical seats across India remained vacant, the NBEMS revised the qualifying percentiles for NEET-PG 2025 admissions, drastically reducing it for all the categories.According to the notice published by NBEMS, the NEET PG cutoff for the General Category and EWS has been reduced to seven percentile from 50 while for General PwBD candidates it has been lowered to five from 45.Reserved category candidates scoring as low as minus 40 out of 800 are eligible to take part in the third round of counselling for PG medical seats. For the SC/ST/OBC category, the percentile has been reduced from 40 to zero.