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NEW DELHI: Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed to examine a public interest litigation challenging the decision of National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences to reduce the qualifying cut-off percentiles for NEET-PG 202526, which would allow even candidates with zero or negative scores to qualify.A bench of Justices P S Narasimha and Alok Aradhe issued a notice on the PIL and posted the case for Feb 6.The petitioners alleged that reducing the cut-off would affect patient safety, public health and the medical profession. They raised the point that the move, undertaken primarily to fill vacant seats, abolished merit as a criterion and converted a competitive examination into an administrative formality. They said medicine directly impacted human life, bodily integrity and dignity, and dilution of professional standards in the field was impermissible.Over 18,000 postgraduate medical seats across the country remain vacant.
