2 min readMumbaiJul 23, 2026 03:21 PM IST
In a significant overhaul of medical admissions in Maharashtra, the state government has abolished the institutional round for undergraduate medical and dental admissions in private colleges, bringing all seat allotments under the centralised counselling process run by the State Common Entrance Test (CET) Cell.
The government has also introduced a penalty to curb seat blocking. Candidates allotted a seat in the final round who fail to join, leaving it vacant, will be barred from undergraduate medical and dental admissions in Maharashtra for the next two academic years.
The Medical Education and Drugs Department notified the revised rules on Thursday, saying all admissions, including stray vacancy rounds, will now go only through the Common Admission Process (CAP) run by the CET Cell. This ends the long-standing practice of private colleges holding separate institutional rounds to fill vacant seats at the end of the admission cycle, a process students, parents and activists had criticised as opaque, prone to arbitrary allotments and excessive fee demands.
Until now, seats left vacant after CAP rounds were surrendered to colleges, which ran their own institutional rounds before the admission deadline. “Now that all admissions have to be through CAP, the CET Cell will conduct admissions till the cut-off date. If seats remain vacant even after that, they will remain vacant, with no possibility of an institutional round,” a CET Cell official said, adding it should discourage colleges from holding back seats for institutional rounds.
“This will compel colleges to fill as many seats as possible instead of avoiding candidates to keep seats for the institutional round, which used to happen,” the official said. The new penalty is also meant to cut seat blocking. “The compulsion to take admission on the seat allotted in the final round will automatically reduce seat blocking. Students will no longer be able to decline a seat in the hope of securing a better option through an institutional round,” the official said.
The notification retains the existing “free exit” for candidates after the first CAP round. Those who relinquish seats after the third round remain ineligible for subsequent rounds.