The National Medical Commission, the apex regulatory authority for medical education, announced on Wednesday that it had decided to eliminate the upper age limit for the National Eligiblity-cum-Entrance Test for admission to MBBS courses.

The age limit so far had been 25 years.

“It has been decided… that there should not be any fixed upper age limit for appearing in the NEET-UG examination,” the NMC said in a note to the National Testing Agency.

It asked that the information bulletin be modified accordingly and said an official notification was in the offing.

Around 1.5 million candidates annually take the NEET-UG, competing for roughly 86,000 MBBS seats at government and private medical colleges across the country.

The commission’s move has evoked a mixed response from doctors. Some have applauded the decision, saying it would provide an opportunity to many who couldn’t take the exam earlier but are keen on becoming doctors.

Other doctors said the move threatened to introduce unfair competition for those taking the exam during or shortly after Class XII.

“This would allow dentists or paramedics or nursing students to also take the exam. Such candidates might have an unfair advantage over those who’re in Class XII,” said Rohan Krishnan, president of the Federation of the All India Medical Association, a doctors’ body.

Krishnan said that eliminating the age bar at the lowest level of entry into medicine would be incompatible with the upper age bars for higher levels, including those for the positions of senior residents and assistant professors.

“We won…. It was a long-fought battle, I’m thankful to our lawyers and to the government,” Amit Gupta, a doctor and students’ rights activist, said through messages posted on Twitter on Wednesday evening.

Gupta had in 2017 helped students file a petition in the Supreme Court challenging the upper age limit. According to media reports, the court had granted interim relief to the students pending a final ruling, and sought the commission’s stance on the matter.

There have been rare instances in the past of older people taking the medical entrance exam. One of the most prominent among them was Dr Sujoy Guha, an electrical engineer who decades ago received special permission to take the entrance exam at age 38 and completed the MBBS course from a Delhi medical college.

Guha pursued research in biomedical engineering and devised a long-term, reversible male contraceptive.