Zero marks & still can be doctor (#NEET). Society deserves the doctors, it chooses and nurtures.

Rot of exorbitantly expensive medical education and lowered merit  has been systematic. Aspiring doctors are now forced to pay exorbitant fee,  in millions. Many go under heavy debt to pay medical colleges fee. Children with lower ranks in merit pay millions and can  become doctors. The real problem here is that real deserving will be left out.

Medical students from the very onset are victim and witness to  these practices and   exploitation. They see their parents pay this unreasonable fee through their noses or take loans. Such blatant injustice  will have an everlasting effect on the young impressionable minds. Society gives them lessons of corruption and exploitation.

Our society fails to develops a robust system of choosing and  nurturing  good doctors and therefore  itself responsible for decline in standards of medical profession.

Some MBBS students got zero or less in NEET papers

With no cut-off for individual subjects – physics, chemistry and biology—in the NEET entrance exam, at least 400 students with single-digit marks in physics and chemistry and 110 students with zero or negative marks in them have been admitted for MBBS in 2017, mostly in private colleges. This raises a question. If getting zero in these subjects doesn’t make a person ineligible for admission, why bother to test in that subject at all? Interestingly, the original notification to adopt a common entrance examination had stipulated that students should score at least 50% in individual subjects. However, the subsequent notification, which brought in the percentile system, dropped the stipulation on marks in individual subjects. TOI analysed the subject marks of 1,990 students who got admitted to MBBS with NEET scores of less than 150 out of 720 in 2017. it was found that 530 with single-digit marks, zero or less in physics or chemistry or even both.

Doctors are just as offshoots of a tree called as society. They essentially are the same as rest of the society.  It is a specialized branch of tree which helps other offshoots of tree to save others.  As  part of same tree, they resemble the parent society, of which they are part.  Society needs to choose and nurture a force of doctors carefully with an aim to combat for  safety of its own people.  

       Apple tree will have apples and musk melons plant will  grow muskmelons only.  One should not expect apples to grow on muskmelon stem. If society has failed to demand for a good and robust system, failed to save them, it should not  rue scarcity of good doctors. Merit based cheap good medical education system is the need of the society. This is in interest of society to nurture good doctors for its own safety.

What is the need to dilute and shortlist around half a million for few thousand seats. Answer to that is simple.  To select and find only those students from millions, who can pay millions to become doctors.  

      Although the whole effort and huge expenditure to become doctors in this way may be really worthless in today’s scenario, considering the difficult times and vulnerability of medical profession. By allowing a intentional dilution of quality  can be advantageous only to  few and detrimental to others. 

If the society continues to accept such below par practices, it has to introspect, whether it actually deserves to get good doctors. Paying the irrational fee of medical colleges may be unwise idea for the candidates, who are not from strong financial backgrounds. But at the same time unfortunately, it may be a compulsion and entrapment for students, who have entered the profession and there is no way  forward.  So children have to be careful while choosing medical careers from the beginning.

A famous axiom “as you sow so shall you reap” has an application to health system in this scenario, so people should not rue scarcity of good doctors.     Therefore the quality of doctors who survive and flourish in such system will be a natural consequence of  how society chooses and nurtures the best for themselves.