Tamil Nadu and Puducherry counselling

These two neighbouring processes are the ones candidates most often read wrongly, because Tamil Nadu does something almost no one expects: it does not rank you by your All India Rank. Puducherry does. Getting that one fact the wrong way round makes every cutoff you look at meaningless.

Tamil Nadu: the rank is not your All India Rank

The Tamil Nadu Selection Committee publishes its own merit list and its own rank, usually written as GRANK. It is derived from your NEET-PG marks but it is a position within the pool of candidates who applied to Tamil Nadu, so it is a completely different number from your All India Rank.

The practical consequence: a Tamil Nadu closing rank of 300 and an MCC closing rank of 300 have nothing to do with each other. Comparing them, or feeding your All India Rank into a Tamil Nadu cutoff table, produces nonsense. FindMyBranch asks Tamil Nadu candidates for their GRANK for exactly this reason, and never scores a Tamil Nadu seat against an All India Rank.

Tamil Nadu keeps two separate merit lists

This is the second trap. The Government Quota list and the Management Quota list are different lists, with different application number series and different ranks for the same person.

The gap is not small and not consistent. In the published lists it is easy to find a Management Quota rank in the low tens sitting alongside marks that would place well down the Government Quota list, and the reverse. So a management seat that closed at “rank 53” is not a seat that needed a government rank of 53. It needed rank 53 on a different, much shorter list.

If you are considering both, you have two ranks and you need both of them to read cutoffs honestly. The tool asks for both.

In-service candidates are in the same lists

Tamil Nadu’s government quota includes candidates already working in government service, who are allotted through a service reservation. They appear in the same published list, marked as service candidates, and they are frequently allotted at much worse ranks than a fresh graduate would need.

In the lists behind this site those rows are a third to a half of some years. If a cutoff table pools them in, a seat can look reachable at a rank where no fresh graduate has ever got it. One popular specialty at a major Chennai college appears to close around rank 3,800 with service rows included, and around rank 70 without them. FindMyBranch excludes service rows from every Tamil Nadu government cutoff.

Where Tamil Nadu’s government quota seats actually are

Government Quota does not mean government college. Tamil Nadu’s government quota includes the state quota seats surrendered by self-financing colleges, so a government quota seat can be at a private college, at government fees. Christian Medical College Vellore adds a further layer, with institutional categories that appear in the management quota list but are not paid management seats.

Puducherry: CENTAC, and it does use your All India Rank

Puducherry’s counselling is run by CENTAC, and its published allotment lists record the candidate’s NEET All India Rank. So for Puducherry, unlike Tamil Nadu, the number you already know is the number that matters.

It is a small process by comparison: one government institution, Indira Gandhi Medical College and Research Institute, plus a handful of private colleges. The published lists are correspondingly short, which means a single year’s number carries less weight than it would in a large state. Read several years.

The Puducherry colleges CENTAC does not allot

A recurring confusion. Several well-known Puducherry institutions are deemed universities, and deemed university seats are filled entirely by MCC, not by CENTAC. Searching CENTAC data for them returns nothing, which reads as missing data but is not.

They are still Puducherry colleges a candidate here is choosing between, so FindMyBranch shows them as a clearly separate section on the Puducherry results, scored from the MCC records against your All India Rank, and labelled as a different counselling process.

Practical order of play

• Register for the All India Quota process and your state process separately. One does not cover the other.
• Work out which rank applies before you read any cutoff: GRANK for Tamil Nadu government seats, the management list rank for Tamil Nadu management seats, All India Rank for CENTAC and for everything MCC allots.
• Check whether the cutoffs you are reading exclude in-service candidates. If the source does not say, assume they are included and that the number is too soft.