Why NEET fails to ensure merit-based admissions

Though there were only about 61,000 seats to be filled through NEET 2019, as in the earlier years of NEET, ranks of those who got admission went down all the way to 8.45 lakh. That raises the question -- If lakhs of students with much higher scores do not get admission but someone at the bottom does, can these admissions be called merit-based?