How NRI quota became the golden ticket to med school for rich Indians

Late last month, the Supreme Court made a very strong statement about NRI quotas at medical colleges. It essentially said that the whole thing was a fraud. 

But the thing is, since the Supreme Court called it out, the practice has only gotten murkier. So The Ken reporter Alifiya Khan conducted an investigation. She scoured several social networking sites only to find countless posts promising seats in medical institutes to aspirants who scored way  below the required cutoff and even those who were hardly eligible for the NRI quota. 

The only requirement? Well, applicants need to be ready to cough up some big bucks. The Ken wanted to see if there was something to these claims. So Alifiya went undercover. She posed as the sibling of a Maharashtra-based MBBS aspirant, with a measly NEET score of 180. She then contacted four education consultancies. And all of them, quite unsurprisingly, had boilerplate replies. The running thread – regardless of your score, they would hook you up with a medical college. 

And yet, most people high up in medical colleges don’t want to let go of NRI quota. Because in many ways it is what keeps the whole system afloat. What’s going on? 

Stay tuned.