Five things you need to know about Vyapam Scam

March 25, 2015 01:55 pm | Updated April 21, 2017 06:00 pm IST

1. The scam involves massive irregularities and corruption in the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board (MPPEB) or MP Vyavsayik Pareeksha Mandal, abbreviated in Hindi as Vyapam. It has been alleged—by the opposition Congress as well as several social activists—that the corrupt officials at the board took money to compromise the examination and recruitment for several professional course including Pre-Engineering, Pre-Medical, MCA, Teaching etc. The current accusations mostly involve teaching recruitments.

2. The opposition Congress—led by AICC general secretary Digvijay Singh, Jyotiraditya Scindia and Kamal Nath—has accused persons at the highest levels of government of being involved in the scam, including CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan, his wife Sadhna Singh and governor Ram Naresh Yadav. The Congress has alleged that these influential persons used their power to push for candidates, via several middlemen including mining baron and prime accused Sudhir Sharma, of their choice to be admitted to certain curses or recruited to certain posts.

3. The whistleblower in the case—an IT expert from Indore—claims to have accessed sensitive information from the computers of the main accused, while assisting the Special Task Force probing the scam. Among other things, he claims to have unearthed an excel-sheet document which contains names of several candidates and the people who recommended them, and SMS exchange between the middlemen and government functionaries. The Congress claims that the STF, in an attempt to shield Mr. Chouhan, had fudged the original excel-sheet and replaced it with another one in which the Mr. Chouhan's name had been purportedly replaced with entries “CM” and “Uma Bhartiji”.

4. February was an eventful month in the scam timeline. To start with, Congress leaders openly accused Mr. Chouhan and his wife of being involved in the scam. Later, they submitted the “original evidence”, inlcuding excel sheet documents, call detail records and a pen drive to the Special Investigation Team which is overseeing the STF probe. Then, the STF named governor Ram Naresh Yadav in its FIR. Also last month, the Delhi High Court granted protection to the whistleblower. On Friday, the whistleblower submitted all “incirminating evidence” to the Delhi HC.

5. On Monday, the Supreme Court asked the STF to finish its probe in four months. Today, there was a shocking development in the case with Shailesh Yadav, governor Yadav's son, and accused in the scam, being found dead in his house in Lucknow.

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