Tripura to hold fresh exam for vacant SC/ST seats in MBBS

Agartala, Sep 12 : The Tripura Government has decided to conduct another exam under Tripura Joint Entrance Board (TJEB) to fill up 29 seats in reserved categories, including 25 ST seats, which had been left vacant in AGMC this year because of non-availability of qualified students.

After several rounds of discussion at an all-party meeting yesterday, higher education department announced that TBJEE would conduct a fresh examination for ST/SC students to fill up the vacancies.

In the all-party meeting, opposition Congress had raised strong demands of reviewing all answer scripts of medical joint entrance examination while the state government gave opinion in favour of re-examining all the candidates.

Both Chief Minister Manik Sarkar and Health Minister Tapan Chakraborty had written separate letters to Union Health Minister Ghulam Navi Azad and the Medical Council of India (MCI) requesting to reduce the cut-off marks from the prescribed 40 in state joint entrance exam for SC and ST students.

Replying to chief minister’s letter, Azad on August 8 clearly stated that the issue involved two aspects--teaching and treatment and the professionals would be dealing with living human beings, so, diluting qualifying criteria was neither feasible nor desirable.

He said two separate writ petitions were filed in Guahati High Court's Agartala bench demanded filling up of reserved medical seats by reducing cut-off mark.

The bench rejected the plea for reduction of cut-off marks prescribed by the MCI for reserved categories for getting admission in MBBS last month.