All India Institute Of Medical Sciences, Patna

AIIMS Patna fills 125 MBBS seats a year, and a candidate from Bihar holds no home-ground advantage for a single one of them. Every seat is an All India Quota place decided on a NEET-UG rank, which is why the institute's medical roll is split almost evenly between Bihar and the rest of the country. It is a government Institute of National Importance, placed 27 on the NIRF 2025 Medical list, built around a tertiary hospital at Phulwari Sharif on the western edge of Patna. The handful of things a candidate actually has to plan for, the entrance, the seat split, the fee and where the degree leads, are fewer and more fixed than an institute of this size might suggest.

AIIMS Patna opened to students in 2012. Its origin explains much of what it is: the Pradhan Mantri Swasthya Suraksha Yojana raised six new AIIMS across the country in that period, and Bihar, until then without a referral hospital of national standing, was given one of them. Its institutional record places the campus at Phulwari Sharif, a township on the south-western side of Patna. Parliament created the institute by statute, giving it the standing of an Institute of National Importance. Administered directly by the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, it confers its own degrees and answers to no Bihar affiliating university.

One figure sets Patna apart from the second-generation AIIMS around it. Its NIRF 2025 data submission records 596 MBBS students on its rolls, of whom 280 are from within Bihar and 316 from outside the state, so the home state supplies close to half the class with no domicile quota doing the work. At a college where every seat is won on an open national rank, that near-balance is a quiet measure of how many Bihar candidates now clear the AIIMS threshold on merit alone.

The undergraduate MBBS is the institute's foundation, and every higher qualification it offers is a specialisation stacked above that first degree.

The fee is the part of an AIIMS offer that looks least like the rest of the private medical market. Central funding keeps an MBBS year here priced in the low thousands rather than the lakhs a self-financed college charges for the same course, which is why the seat is contested on rank and not on the ability to pay. AIIMS Patna does not print one all-in MBBS figure on its website, so a joining family should read the exact head-wise charges off the current MCC counselling bulletin and the institute's admission notice for that session rather than trusting a directory's fee box.

For MBBS the whole decision rests on one figure, your all-India NEET-UG rank. Since the AIIMS institutes were folded into the shared medical counselling, every undergraduate seat here is an All India Quota place, so allotment runs end to end through the Medical Counselling Committee. The sequence is fixed: create an MCC login, enter and lock a preference order of colleges and courses, wait for the software to run the round, and travel to Phulwari Sharif only once a written allotment letter names the seat. No institute-conducted test, no management seat and no Bihar-domicile route sits alongside it.

Postgraduate entry trips up more applicants than the MBBS route does, usually because they arrive holding the wrong exam result. Residency in an MD or MS discipline is allotted on INI-CET, the common entrance that AIIMS New Delhi sets for every Institute of National Importance, and the DM and MCh super-specialties are filled from a separate INI-SS merit list. NEET-PG, the score that unlocks seats across state and private colleges, carries no weight inside the AIIMS system at all. What decides the paper is the rung of training being entered, not the standing of the institute it is entered at.

There is no published cutoff for AIIMS Patna, and the habit of treating a single number as the bar to clear gets the mechanism wrong. Admission tracks a candidate's standing in the NEET-UG national merit order and nothing else. The cutoff students quote to each other is a backward-looking artefact, the closing rank of the last person admitted in a category once an MCC round has finished, and it shifts with every round and every reservation category. Patna's general-category seats usually close a shade later in the order than Delhi's or those at the top-ranked newer institutes, and later still through the mop-up rounds as higher scorers trade up or withdraw, but they still land well inside the country's sharpest NEET-UG ranks. The practical move is to ignore any figure held over from a previous year and follow this cycle's live MCC allotment instead, category by category and round by round.

A placement percentage is close to meaningless for an MBBS, which finishes not with a job offer but with a compulsory rotating internship and, for most graduates, another competitive exam. The institute still files placement figures, and its NIRF 2025 data submission shows how the recent classes divided: in 2022-23, 51 of the 97 who qualified were recorded as placed and 46 moved straight into further study, and the 99 and 95 who graduated in the two prior years split along the same lines, with a median first pay of Rs 12,36,000 logged for those who took a post.

The more telling figures sit with the residents who leave with an MD or MS. Across three successive exit years, 2021-22, 2022-23 and 2023-24, their median pay held steady at Rs 14,40,000 in the same filing, and the cohorts themselves stayed level, at 67 finishers, then 74, then 73. That flat line is the honest picture of a young institute: the value a graduate carries out is measured less in a first salary than in the clinical depth behind the degree and the option to contest AIIMS Patna's own DM and MCh seats without moving cities.

Because none of the 125 seats is a state-quota place, the reservation pattern is the Union roster applied whole, with nothing set aside for Bihar domicile. The MCC final seat matrix for the 2024 undergraduate round lists AIIMS Patna under code 200508 and breaks its intake into 48 open, 31 OBC, 18 SC, 12 EWS and 9 ST places, each category also carrying a one- or two-seat PwBD reservation, as the table sets out.

Open and OBC remain the broadest routes in, while the reserved lines track the national roster exactly. The counts are redrawn each admission cycle, which is why an applicant should work from the live MCC matrix rather than a breakdown copied from a previous year.

AIIMS Patna's one national placement is on the NIRF 2025 Medical ranking, where it sits at rank 27 with an overall score of 59.24. Split into the five scoring heads, its profile is that of a young teaching hospital carried by its classroom and graduation marks while its research score still lags.

Two things stand out in that ranking table. Teaching, Learning and Resources, at 79.83, is by a clear margin its best score, and a Perception mark of 45.60 is high for an institute barely a decade old, well ahead of where most of its PMSSY-era siblings sit on that measure. Graduation Outcomes at 77.03 and Outreach and Inclusivity at 60.29 fill out a steady middle, while Research and Professional Practice at 30.95 is the weight on the total, the slowest parameter for any new medical school to build. That last number is starting to move: the institute's data submission logs 66 sponsored projects drawing on 29 funding agencies in 2023-24, against 38 projects two years before, so the weakest column on the card is also the one climbing fastest.

The department structure at AIIMS Patna follows the usual medical-school layers, pre-clinical and para-clinical sciences underneath, the clinical specialties in the middle, and a super-specialty tier on top. That top tier is not just on paper: the NIRF 2025 data submission records 12 students graduating from its DM and MCh programmes in 2023-24, an output only a school with fully staffed advanced departments can produce.

A department-by-department list for the institute is not something published on a single official page worth pointing to, so rather than reproduce an aggregator's version, the current roster of departments and the seats each holds is best read from the academic section of its official website.

The teaching hospital is the institute's working core, smaller than the biggest AIIMS but sized for genuine tertiary care. The NIRF 2025 data submission records a hospital of 1,213 beds running at an average of 910 filled on any given day through 2023, with an average outpatient attendance of 3,276 a day. That volume, and the range of late-stage disease it brings onto the wards, is what lets a college first opened in 2012 teach the full span of clinical medicine.

Everything sits on the single Phulwari Sharif campus, the college, the hospital and the administrative block within one perimeter. For students with disabilities, the same NIRF return reports that lift or ramp access reaches more than four in five of the institute's buildings, that wheelchairs and transport between blocks are provided, and that adapted toilets are in place for those who need them.

Living on campus is effectively part of the course here. The ward duties of the clinical years and the internship run at hours no daily commute can serve, and the institute keeps its students in hostels inside the grounds for that reason. Room rent and mess charges are billed apart from tuition, so they belong in a joining budget as a separate line rather than an afterthought. Because no standing hostel tariff is published and rooms are given out as they fall vacant, the practical step after admission is to confirm the current rate and the allotment with the academic section, not to assume accommodation comes bundled with the seat.

How many teachers the institute fields is one measure of how far it has come from a standing start, and the NIRF 2025 data submission puts the number at 229 faculty, the headcount that anchors its Teaching, Learning and Resources score. In practice a faculty roll of that size means that in most departments a student on the wards and a resident drafting a thesis can both find a consultant or senior resident free, without the queue for one teacher that a thin department creates.

That same faculty supervises a large clinical-postgraduate body. The same return records 327 doctors enrolled for an MD, MS or DNB and, above them, a doctoral programme that is still very small, so the consultant who grades an undergraduate's answer sheet is frequently also running a referral clinic and guiding a postgraduate's research at once.

AIIMS Patna took its first MBBS intake in 2012, which is simply too recent for a cohort of nationally prominent alumni to have formed, and the doctors who trained here earliest are only now reaching mid-career. Naming individuals from an unverified listing would be a guess dressed as fact, so the accurate statement is that the alumni base is still young and dispersing into hospital posts, residencies and research across the country. That kind of distinguished roll is something an institution earns over decades, and Patna has not yet had them.

AIIMS Patna posts its own current notices, its tenders, recruitment adverts, examination schedules and event announcements, on the news panels of its official website, and for anything time-sensitive that page is the record to trust over a third-party repost that may already be stale. The one thing those panels do not govern is MBBS admission. That is run on the national MCC counselling calendar, so an applicant should be watching the counselling portal, not the institute's notice board, for anything to do with the seat.

Inside Patna, the comparison that matters most is with the city's older government medical colleges, and it is why "PMCH or AIIMS Patna" is such a common search. Patna Medical College and Hospital is one of the oldest medical colleges in the country, with a vast patient base and deep local standing, while Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences is the Bihar state institute in the same city. What sets AIIMS Patna apart from both is less reputation than the kind of seat: an AIIMS place is won purely on an all-India NEET-UG rank with no state-domicile weighting, whereas a large share of seats at the state colleges is reserved for Bihar-domicile candidates, which changes both the odds and the merit an applicant needs.

Placed against the other AIIMS, Patna is a capable member of the second generation rather than a challenger to the founding institute. AIIMS New Delhi remains well clear of the field on the medical table, and Patna's rank of 27 puts it around the middle of the six that the first PMSSY phase produced. Since fees and the entrance route are effectively identical from one AIIMS to the next, a candidate weighing them is really comparing the city, the mix of cases a given hospital draws and how far each has grown into its role, and on that last point Patna's near-even Bihar intake and its growing super-specialty programme mark it as an institute that has found its footing.

AIIMS Patna is a single-campus institution at Phulwari Sharif, on the south-western edge of the city in Bihar. Teaching, the wards and administration are not scattered across Patna but gathered at one address, so a visitor deals with the whole institute at a single gate.

A practical point for anyone planning to write in or visit: no MBBS seat is decided at a campus office, so questions about allotment belong with the MCC rather than with Patna. And the place runs as a working referral hospital first, with its teaching and administrative wings keeping hours of their own that have nothing to do with when the OPD opens.

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