Rush for medical seats begins

The admission process for government medical colleges began on Monday at the Sir JJ Hospital campus. Around 1,92,685 students will be competing for 9,000 seats spread across a broad range of courses, including MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery), Dental, Ayurveda, Homeopathy and Unani medicine.

The admission process, conducted by the Directorate of Medical Education and Research (DMER), will continue for nine days till July 12.  Students who have cleared the MHT-CET 2011 are eligible for admission.

On the first day, students who figured in the state merit list between 1 to 900, were invited to take admission into their preferred course and college.

Apart from the Mumbai centre, admissions are ongoing at three other centres across the state — BJ Medical College in Pune, Government Medical College in Aurangabad and Government Medical College at Nagpur. Students from Mumbai city and the suburbs, Thane, Raigad, Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg must come to the Mumbai centre.

Dr Pravin Shingare joint director, DMER, said, “During the process, we counselled students on how to fill up the form while checking and verifying documents. After the submission of the form, we give an acknowledgement copy to the student. We have deputed more than 100 officials to conduct the admission process in our four centres and guide students at every step.”

Each student takes an average of two hours to complete the formality of filling and submitting the form.

According to a senior official from JJ hospital, the admission process on Monday was relatively lighter than what’s expected in days to come, since the brightest students come on the first day and get admission into medical colleges for MBBS courses.

Each student can fill 60 choices of colleges in the preference form. The DMER official asks students to take their time to file their preferences and also suggest using a dummy form before ticking the boxes on the final form.

(with inputs from Vishwas Waghmode)