PwD (Persons with Disability) reservation in NEET-PG counselling is a horizontal reservation: unlike Open, OBC, EWS, SC and ST (which are vertical categories that seats are allotted directly against), PwD cuts across every vertical category. A candidate can be, for example, "OBC PwD" or "Open PwD" -- meaning they hold a PwD-reserved seat within the OBC or Open pool, under relaxed eligibility criteria that MCC applies for candidates with benchmark disabilities.
Why this matters for closing-rank data
Closing rank is conventionally defined as the worst (highest) rank actually allotted for a given institute + specialty + category. Because PwD eligibility is relaxed, a PwD candidate can be allotted a seat at a rank far higher (worse) than any non-PwD candidate in that same base category could achieve. If a PwD-tagged row simply gets folded into its base category by stripping the "PwD" label -- which is a completely reasonable-looking simplification -- that one row can badly distort the closing rank shown for everyone else in that category.
A real example from our own data
We found this exact problem while building our Predictor. At Pandit Bhagwat Dayal Sharma Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences, for Orthopaedics (MD/MS), OBC category, 2025 Round 3:
| Method | Closing rank shown |
|---|---|
| PwD allotment folded into OBC (wrong) | 229,954 |
| PwD allotment excluded from OBC (correct) | 6,050 |
That's a 38x difference -- an OBC candidate with a rank around 200,000 reading the wrong figure would have believed they had a real shot at that seat, when in fact only a PwD-eligible candidate could actually get it at that rank. This wasn't an isolated case: across the full 2025 Round 3 dataset, this issue affected 114 out of 11,278 college+specialty+category cells, and 89 out of 9,330 cells in the 2024 dataset we checked.
How NEET-PG Help handles it now
Every closing-rank figure on this site -- across the Predictor, Cutoff Explorer and Seat Matrix -- now excludes PwD-reserved allotments from their base category's closing rank rather than folding them in. This doesn't delete any underlying PwD data; it simply stops a PwD row's much easier rank from being counted toward the base category's own cutoff, which is the statistically correct way to treat a horizontal reservation. A dedicated, standalone PwD-category view (showing PwD candidates their own actual closing ranks) is a planned addition, not yet live.
What this means if you're PwD-eligible
The base-category figures on this site (Open, OBC, EWS, SC, ST) do not currently show you a PwD-specific closing rank -- they show what a non-PwD candidate in that category could reach. If you hold PwD certification, treat these figures as a baseline for the general category pool, not your own eligibility window, until a dedicated PwD view is added.