Reservation System in Tamil Nadu Medical Admission - Explained

How does the reservation system works in Tamil Nadu, particularly with reference to medical college admissions?

Many candidates don't understand the logic behind the admission and get confused (me too, until I spent time to understand the intricacies of it).

First, let us look at what really confuses candidates and parents.

Vacancy Status at the end of Day 1 Counseling

Here is the vacancy status that is published by Selection Committee, Directorate of Medical Education, Tamil Nadu as at the end of 1st July 2018 (after the allotment of 40 seats under special category).

Figure 1

If you look at the above matrix, there are 757 seats under Open Category (OC), which is 31% of the total seats available. You also can notice, each college has the same kind of distribution of seats using the following reservation system:

• Open Category (OC)- 31%
• Backward Community (BC)- 26.5%
• Backward Community-Muslim (BCM) - 3.5%
• Most Backward Community (MBC) - 20%
• Scheduled Caste (SC) -15%
• Scheduled Caste Arundathiyar (SCA) - 3%
• Scheduled Tribe (ST) - 1%

Vacancy Status at the end of Day 2 Counseling

Now look at the vacancy status that is published by Selection Committee, Directorate of Medical Education, Tamil Nadu as at the end of 2nd July 2018. On day two, 572 seats were allotted to candidates.

Figure 2

Total seats at end of Day 1 was 2409; 572 seats allotted on Day 2; balance seats available is 1837.
Total OC seats at end of Day 1 was 757; 572 seats allotted on Day 2; balance seats available is 185.

Perfect, everything adds up. What is the confusion then?

Now, take a closer look at individual colleges information. Let us select Pudukottai medical college for example, which is displayed as the last college in the list. At the end of day 1 (Figure 1), there were 32 seats available under BC category.

Now look at the vacancy at the end of day 2 (Figure 2). Oops! There are 54 seats available under BC category. How could seats increase??? You could also see that seats have increased under BCM category, MBC category and SC category.

Colleges without OC candidates

If you review the seat allotment list, you will also find that the following eight colleges do not have any OC candidates:

1. Theni MEDICAL COLLEGE
2. ESIC Coimbatore
3. Dharmapuri Medical College
4. Villupuram Medical College
5. Thiruvannamalai Medical College
6. Thiruvarur Medical College
7. Sivagangai Medical College and
8. Pudukottai Medical College

If there were seats available under OC category in the above colleges at the end of Day 1, why no OC candidate was allotted to these colleges? Do we not have enough OC candidates to fill these seats? Where did the seats disappear?

Confusion in Counseling Procedure

Now, let me summarize the two doubts that candidates or parents might have:

1. How did seats increase under reservation category from Day 1 to Day 2?
2. How did the OC seats disappear from the eight colleges mentioned?

So, the above two questions answer each other. The disappearing OC seats should have appeared as reserved category seats. Right? But, how? Let me explain how it works.

How seat allotment happens?

Look at Figure 1. There are 757 seats available under OC category. So, the first 757 seat allotments would be counted against OC category, irrespective of which category the candidate belongs to, irrespective of which college he chooses and irrespective of which category seat he/ she is opting for.

Let me take Madras Medical College (MMC) as an example, to explain this further. Based on Figure 1, there are 65 OC category seats. Let us assume that the top 65 rank holders all opt for MMC.

So, OC category seats in MMC would be finished by the time 66th rank holder enters the counseling hall. If he is an OC candidate, he will opt for Stanley Medical College, most likely. So, he gets an OC seat in Stanley. No problem. Just move on.

But, let us say, the 66th rank holder is a BC candidate. If he is interested in any other college other than MMC, no confusion. In case he selects Madurai Medical College, he will be allotted an OC seat under Madurai since there are still OC seats available in Madurai.

But, what is most likely to happen? He wants to take a seat in MMC. He can do so, only by taking a seat under BC category. But, since he is among the top 757 candidates, any seat he chooses should be counted as OC seat.

So, what they do? They convert that one BC seat in MMC to an OC seat (this is only theoretical, but will not be reflected in any updates). That indirectly means, one BC seat is lost. So, it has to be compensated by converting an OC seat to a BC seat. To achieve this, they will decrease one OC seat in Pudukottai Medical College (or any other college) and increase one BC seat in the same college.

I believe the system would randomly choose a college to do this adjustment (or as per some rules given by the Selection Committee). This kind of re-adjustment would happen for the top 757 seat allocations, if the candidate takes up a reserved category seat. As this process of conversion continues, some colleges might run out of OC seats completely. They would have been converted to other category seats in the same college.

Conclusion

I tried to explain the procedure as much as I can. I know it could still be confusing. Please comment below with your queries, if any. I will try to clear them to the extent of my understanding.