NEET PG Exam Centres In Kerala: Shashi Tharoor’s Special Request To Minister Nadda
Thiruvananthapuram, 14 June 2025 – Congress MP Shashi Tharoor has appealed to Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda to address the difficulties faced by aspiring doctors in Kerala regarding the NEET PG 2025 examination. Tharoor points out that a shortage of exam centres within the state has already forced many students to select centres elsewhere, causing significant hardship.
Originally scheduled for 15 June, the NEET PG exam was postponed following a Supreme Court directive that it be held in a single shift to ensure fairness; it has now been rescheduled to 3 August 2025. The exam will run from 09:00 to 12:30, with 200 multiple-choice questions spread across five sections, each lasting 42 minutes, and will be conducted entirely in English. Candidates are marked +4 for correct answers and penalised –1 for incorrect ones.
A resubmission window for exam-city preferences opened on 13 June, allowing applicants until 17 June to revise their choices. Tharoor emphasised that Kerala’s candidates found its centres fully booked within minutes of the reopening, adding that, even though the National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences (NBEMS) has data on applicant numbers, additional centres were not allocated to Kerala. He warned that students are now facing not just logistical but financial burdens as they travel to other states for the exam.
Tharoor urged Minister Nadda to immediately authorise more NEET PG centres in Kerala, particularly within medical-college towns. He stated that the exam is too important to saddling students with travel woes. His intervention follows similar demands by Kerala MPs in previous years, citing candidates being forced to journey over 1,000 km to neighbouring states.
Independent observers note that postponing the exam and switching to a single shift demands substantial organisational adjustments: increasing centre infrastructure, deploying secure exam venues, and managing admit-card issuance. Admit cards are due to be released on 11 June, while city-intimation slips were circulated on 2 June, following the final correction window which closed on 26 May.
The NEET PG syllabus covers all subjects mandated by the Graduate Medical Education Regulations—Anatomy, Biochemistry, Pharmacology, General Medicine, Psychiatry and more—allowing candidates entry to postgraduate courses in MD, MS, DNB and diploma programmes across medical institutions.
In his letter, Tharoor referenced these developments and appealed that Kerala students should not be denied the opportunity to sit the exam within their own state. He noted that reasonable distribution of exam centres is within the NBEMS’s remit and urged that the board review centre allocation before the 17 June preference deadline.
