CBI filed charge sheet against 592 accused in MP’s Vyapam scam
BHOPAL : The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI ) on Thursday filed the charge sheet in a court here in connection with anomalies in Pre-Medical Test in 2012. After a 28-month probe, the apex investigative agency has named 592 accused in the 1500-page charge sheet.
It includes owners of several leading private medical colleges. The charge sheet reportedly has named several government physicians as well. Sensing trouble after the chagesheet, several of the accused moved anticipatory bail applications with the Bhopal court on Thursday.
Private medical colleges are accused of selling seats for Rs 80 lakh to Rs 1.5 crore, leading to a roughly Rs 2,000 crore scam. It was PMT scandal which had blown the lid off the larger Vyapam scam in Madhya Pradesh. On the basis of an anonymous letter, the police in Indore had in 2013 cracked down on hotel and lodges. At one place, an occupant threw his bag outside the room seeing the police.
the police found an admit card of PMT of some other candidate in the bag. The man in police interrogation led to exposure of state wide racket busy helping medical aspirants clearing the test with the help of imposters and also through fudging of answer sheets at MP Professional Examination Board, better known with its Hindi acronym Vyapam.
Among the accused named in the charge sheet are J. N. Choksey, chairman of L. N. Medical College; S.N. Vijaywargiya of People’s Medical College; Ajay Goenka of Chirayu Medical College and Suresh Singh Bhadoriya of Index Medical College, apart from 22 other officials of the colleges, said the agency on Thursday.
The CBI said it has written to the state government, and is also approaching the Medical Council of India, to probe into the allegation that for a total of 229 seats, the four medical colleges enrolled students who had not appeared for the entrance examination. The agency has also flagged a 2012 Supreme Court ruling, alleging that the colleges violated it while inducting students.
“The seats, which also included the state government’s quota, were not given to those who were in the merit list. There was also a violation of the reservation rules,” said a CBI official.
The official said: “A total of 334 impersonators and beneficiaries, 155 guardians of the beneficiaries who paid for ensuring that their wards could copy answers from those of the impersonators, four Vyapam officials, 46 exam invigilators, 22 middlemen and two officials of the state’s Department of Medical Education have also been named.”
The two officials have been identified as S. C. Tiwari, the then director, and N. M. Srivastava, the then joint director of the Medical Education Department. The accused Vyapam officials are the then director Pankaj Trivedi, senior system analyst Nitin Mohindra and deputy analyst Ajay Kumar Sen.
Of those named in this charge sheet, 245 have been arraigned as accused for the first time. The others figured in another charge sheet filed by the CBI earlier.Explaining the modus operandi, the CBI official said the middlemen hired bright students from various states to appear in the examination.
A large number of them had already cleared another entrance test. Allegedly in connivance with Vyapam officials, the seating arrangements were manipulated to ensure that these impersonators sat in front of the candidates, who could then easily copy the answers.
“The impersonators would also qualify the test, opt for the four private colleges and then withdraw. The colleges did not inform the authorities about such vacant seats,” alleged the official.
The agency managed to identify the impersonator through a gruelling exercise of checking the past hostel/hotel records located close to test centres in Madhya Pradesh, matching their photographs on applications with those available in the social media, credit card payments for the stays and through online/electronic tracking and surveillance.
