Several candidates with disabilities who cleared the NEET exam in 2025 have been rejected by many of the 16 medical boards across India as being ineligible to do MBBS due to their disability. The candidates complained that the boards seem to be unaware or poorly trained in the new interim guidelines on “functional assessment” of persons with disabilities issued on July 19. With no appellate body being constituted by the National Medical Commission (NMC) or the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), as directed by the Supreme Court, the candidates are left with no forum for redress other than courts.According to the National Testing Agency, 753 of the 8,842 candidates with disabilities who sat for the NEET exam have cleared it. The interim guidelines state that legal and policy developments collectively emphasise the prioritisation of “functional competency over rigid percentage-based disability thresholds”. They talk about facilitating reasonable accommodations, revisiting eligibility norms and adopting evaluation criteria focused on individual capabilities.Yet, according to a wheelchair-using candidate who was rejected, the board asked the person to perform seven physical activities including walking, standing and climbing stairs. Another candidate with missing fingers was rejected by a board in Tamil Nadu but went to Kerala for counselling for the All-India quota and was selected.The NMC has failed to identify at least one assessment centre in each state though the apex court order in Oct last year stated that “the availability of medical boards should be increased so that there is minimum one medical board in each state and union territory for proper medical examination of students who have passed the examination”. With just 16 centres in 11 states, candidates are forced to spend considerable amounts on travelling, food and lodging.“There appears to be very poor sensitisation in the boards on how to deal with candidates with disabilities. A board in Chennai referred to the candidate as “patient” while rejecting her saying that she is “wheelchair bound”. How will they select when they see her as a patient?” said Dr Satendra Singh, founder of Doctors With Disabilities: Agents of Change, India’s largest network of health professionals with disabilities.This is despite the Supreme Court order stating: “To enable members of the Disability Assessment Boards to effectively apply the functional competency test, they must be adequately trained by professionals and persons with disabilities or those who have worked on disability justice”. It further mandated that each disability assessment board include at least one doctor with a disability.Although counselling commenced on 21 July 2025, no training schedule for members of the disability assessment boards has been published and no directive has been issued mandating the inclusion of a doctor with a disability on the boards.“The NMC had agreed in court to change the name of the boards from Disability Assessment Boards to Ability Assessment Boards to reflect the change in the focus of the assessments, but that term is nowhere there in the interim guidelines. Candidates with disabilities are paying the price and not everyone can afford to go to court,” said Dr Singh, who has written to the NMC and the DGHS. He added that the interim guidelines were inadequate, though NMC’s expert committee had taken nine months to frame them in time for the 2025-26 academic year.
