Bhubaneswar, June 26: The Medical Council of India (MCI) has accorded its permission to the state government's proposal of adding 100 more MBBS seats to the SCB Medical College and Hospital, Cuttack from this academic year. With this, authorities at the premier institute can now conduct admissions for 250 seats.

“The MCI has accepted our proposal to enhance the undergraduate seats at SCB from 150 to 250,” said Pradipta Kumar Mohapatra, health and family welfare secretary. He said the decision would go a long way to meet the acute shortage of doctors in the state.

Earlier this month, the council had rejected the state government’s proposal to raise the number of seats at SCB. It had cited that the SCB was incapable of handling the seat increase because of deficiencies in infrastructure, manpower, patient-care and academic facilities, said sources.

On the academic front particularly, a MCI team which inspected SCB said it did not have adequate lecture theatres and examination hall-cum-auditoriums.

“I made a presentation before the authority yesterday and also gave an undertaking. They took serious view of it and gave us the nod,” said Mohapatra.

The state government had urged the council to increase seats in the two other government-run medical colleges in the state as well.

“We hope that the MKCG Medical College in Berhampur and VSS Medical College in Burla, which have 150 MBBS seats now, will get 100 more in subsequent phases,” he said.

The number of MBBS seats in the state has now gone up to 750. Apart from this, there are 200 MBBS seats in the two private universities here – Kalinga Institute of Medical Sciences under KIIT University and IMS and Sum Hospital under SoA University.

A concrete decision to raise the number of seats at SCB is important from the medical counselling point of view. Though online registrations for rankholders of National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET)-2013 have already begun, the counselling dates could not be fixed as the seat matrix had not been worked out.

“According to MCI guidelines, counselling has to be completed by July 31. We will try to conduct it by the third week of July,” Mohapatra said.

Over 11,000 medical aspirants from Odisha qualified the test and 85 per cent of MBBS and BDS seats in the state would be reserved for them. They can register themselves on www.odishjee.com till July 7.