The Central Bureau of Investigation has filed a charge sheet against 592 accused persons, including chairmen of four private medical colleges in Madhya Pradesh, in connection with the Vyapam scam involving alleged irregularities in the 2012 pre-medical test.
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.
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