Despite relaxed criteria, BFUHS gets 88 applicants against 498 vacant BDS seats

Despite relaxed criteria, BFUHS gets 88 applicants against 498 vacant BDS seats

Under relaxed eligibility criteria, a general category student needs a minimum 113 marks out of total 720 in NEET-2020

Updated At: Feb 16, 2021 07:47 PM Updated: 9 hours ago

Balwant Garg

Tribune News Service

Faridkot, February 16

A week after Supreme Court lowering the percentile marks by 10 percentile to fill vacant BDS seats, Baba Faridkot University of Health Sciences (BFUHS) has got only 88 applications against 498 vacant BDS seats in 12 dental colleges in the state.

A walk-in physical counselling to fill the vacant seats will start here on Wednesday.

After the Supreme Court’s orders on February 8, the relaxed eligibility criteria for admission in BDS for a general category student is a minimum 113 marks out of total 720 marks in NEET-2020. The eligibility marks for a SC/BC and PWD student is 87 and 99 marks, respectively.

Out of 88 new applicants for the BDS seats, 66 applicants have scored less than 150 marks in NEET-2020. Three candidates of SC/BC category have scores as low as 88, 89 and 90 out of total 720 marks.

The apex court has allowed the relaxation in the eligibility with a cutoff percentile by 10 percentile for each category after many dental colleges approached the court.

It is said more than 7,000 BDS seats have remained vacant in the country this time.

Earlier, some dental colleges had approached the Dental Council of India (DCI), demanding relaxation in the eligibility criteria. The DCI had proposed to the Centre that the percentile for admission to BDS course in Dental colleges should be lowered by 20 percentile for each category but the government had declined to the proposal.

The Union government declined to lower the percentile saying that 7.71 lakh candidates were found to be eligible for filling up 82,000 MBBS and 28,000 BDS course seats in the country. For each vacant seat seven candidates were available.

It said there were 2.77 lakh dentists registered with the Dental Council of India. Taking into consideration the availability of 80 per cent of dentists, there is one dentist for every 6,080 persons which is better than the WHO norms of 1:7,500, it said.

However, the dental colleges approached Supreme Court to get this relief, saying the percentile was lowered last year also.