Chennai: Admissions to allied health undergraduate courses — nursing, physician assistant, physiotherapy and optometry — will begin in Tamil Nadu next week, bypassing the usual sequence that follows medical admissions. Officials at the directorate of medical education said the move is a direct fallout of the NEET-UG crisis.Admissions to MBBS and Indian medicine courses have been withheld after the Centre cancelled NEET-2026, held in May, following complaints of a question paper leak, and scheduled a re-examination on June 21. “We will not be able to start MBBS admissions until Aug at the earliest,” said state selection committee secretary Dr V Lokanayaki. “If we wait for four rounds of MBBS counselling, we will be delaying admissions for all allied courses. It will affect their academic schedule too,” she said.The National Medical Commission mandates that the MBBS academic session begin on Sept 1. When colleges start late, medical institutions are forced to compress semesters, and cut holidays and study leaves to complete the syllabus on time — a burden health department officials say cannot be passed on to allied health courses year after year.The early start may, however, solve one problem while creating another, academicians warn. Students are widely expected to claim allied health seats and hold them as insurance until they secure an MBBS or Indian medicine berth — leaving institutions with blocked seats that they cannot fill, locking out genuine aspirants. “Many students who fail to secure an MBBS or siddha/ayurveda/homeopathy seat opt for nursing and physiotherapy. Now, they will book these seats in advance. Already, many seats in engineering, arts and science colleges are blocked,” said student counsellor Supraja Sriram.To partly address this, the Centre has decoupled allied health admissions from NEET eligibility this year. Admissions to allied health courses will be based on Class XII marks, not NEET scores. “They earlier said that physiotherapy and occupational therapy admissions must be based on NEET. This was changed following representations from several states. This year, all allied health courses are exempted from NEET,” an official said.Students, however, must download separate applications for different courses this year, given varying eligibility criteria. “Usually, they buy one application for multiple courses. That can’t be done this year,” he said. Officials said steps would be taken to ensure students are not burdened with paying for every application.
