While > Vyapam is out of the headlines , it’s now over to DMAT, the next scam to hit the higher education sector in Madhya Pradesh. The Supreme Court is currently hearing a batch of petitions relating to the Dental and Medical Admission Test (DMAT).
Last month, the Madhya Pradesh High Court had remarked that the DMAT scam appeared worse than Vyapam, a view that the Supreme Court has concurred with, while asking the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to take over investigations. While Vyapam (the Hindi acronym for Vyavsayik Pariksha Mandal, the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board or MPPEB) and DMAT dovetail with each other and are acknowledged to be two sides of the same corrupt coin, the two scams actually have a far deeper causal connection.
The DMAT exam is conducted by the Association of Private Dental and Medical Colleges of Madhya Pradesh for management quota, which accounts for 50 per cent of seats in private colleges with the other 50 per cent filled up through examinations conducted by the State through the board that is colloquially referred to as Vyapam.
Unlike the Vyapam scam, which involved the rigging of several exams for selections to various courses and government jobs, the DMAT scam refers only to the exam for admission to private medical and dental colleges. It is the tussle over this one exam, however, that explains how the two scams are linked.
Legal precedents
When private colleges were first set up across India, there were several complaints about the exorbitant capitation fees and under-the-table payments to secure admission. In 1993, the Supreme Court in the Unnikrishnan case, framed a scheme to prevent the commercialisation of admissions to professional colleges. It was decided that a common entrance test would be conducted by the State government and the top 50 per cent of students offered admission to free seats while the next 50 per cent would be eligible for paid seats.
Amid complaints that this amounted to nationalising these colleges, the Supreme Court changed its position in the T.M.A. Pai Foundation case (2002), which scrapped the Unnikrishnan scheme and held that starting an educational institution was a fundamental right and that the government could not interfere in the administrative rights of private institutions, minority or non-minority.
The rights of private institutions were further reinforced by the rulings in the Islamic Academy (2002) and P.A. Inamdar cases (2005), with the former saying that private institutions could hold their own common entrance tests, which would be regulated by a committee headed by a retired judge, and the latter making it clear that the state could not impose any sort of reservation on unaided professional colleges.
Exam amid protests
In 2006, therefore, the MP government decided to follow the Inamdar judgment in letter and allow private dental and medical colleges to conduct their own test. This was something of a surprise — professional courses had always been highly valued in the State but the process of privatisation of education had been a little lopsided. There was a glut of private engineering colleges but only three medical and nine dental colleges were run privately. The last government medical college had been opened 40 years ago.
Given the paucity of colleges, there was intense competition for these few seats. Hence, when the MP government’s nod to the request from private medical and dental colleges to hold their own exams led to a storm of protests, it was taken up as a major students’ issue. The government faced a lot of heat, particularly from the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
In successive petitions to the High Court, the ABVP insisted that admissions to medical colleges should be carried out by the State professional examination board, as private entrance exams would open up the scope for wide corruption. The petitions also stated that the State government had not set up a proper monitoring committee to oversee the exams.
Ultimately, the first DMAT was held in 2006 under a monitoring committee headed by retired High Court judge Chandresh Bhushan (Incidentally, Mr. Bhushan would later head the Special Investigative Team set up by the MP State government to investigate Vyapam). The exam, however, was doomed from the start, with allegations of leaked question papers and seats being sold for huge amounts.
Under intense pressure, with the ABVP holding a series of demonstrations, the State government ordered the monitoring committee to submit a report on the DMAT. Submitted within a week, the report recommended that the DMAT results be cancelled and the test held again by the MPPEB.
Several students who had taken the exam petitioned the MP High Court, which quashed the committee’s order as premature.
The major point stated by the committee as evidence of malpractice was that some students had filled in the sheets with pencil rather than with black ballpoint pen. The committee also relied on media reports about bribes. The High Court decided that this was not basis enough to make thousands of students sit for the exam again and upheld the DMAT results.
Regulatory Act
In September 2007, the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government passed the Madhya Pradesh Niji Vyavasayik Shikshan Sanstha (Pravesh Ka Viniyaman Avam Shulk Ka Nirdharan) Adhiniyam, 2007, roughly translated as the Madhya Pradesh Professional Educational Institutions (Regulation of Admission and Fixation of Fee) Act, 2007). Under its provisions, the government formulated admission rules in 2008 and passed orders in early 2009, stating that the common entrance test for graduate and post-graduate courses in medical and dental colleges would be conducted by an agency nominated by the state. That agency was the Professional Examination Board (PEB) aka Vyapam.
As a corollary to this Act, the State government also made the professional examination board a statutory body. It had previously existed as a body created by executive order for conducting pre-medical and pre-engineering tests for government colleges. The Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board Act, 2007, however, reconstituted its board of directors and required that it be headed by an officer of the rank of chief secretary. Along with control of all professional exam courses, the PEB was also given the task of conducting recruitment exams to about 40 government departments. The Act was challenged in the Madhya Pradesh High Court by several private dental and medical colleges in 2009, on the grounds that it went against the principles laid out in the TMA Pai and Inamdar judgments. In defending the Act, however, the State government relied on two key clauses in the Inamdar judgment.
While allowing private colleges to conduct their own exams, the ruling specified that should the admission procedure adopted by private colleges “fail the triple test of being fair, transparent and non-exploitative, then this procedure could be taken over by the state”. Second, the judgment said that it was ultimately for the Centre, or States in the absence of a central legislation, to come up with a well-thought-out policy on regulating admission and fixing fees for private colleges. The High Court upheld the validity of the Act, swayed in some measure by the allegations of irregularities that DMAT had faced in the past. The Supreme Court, however, differed and said it could not be left to the unilateral decision of the State government to say that the private institutions had failed to meet the triple test.
It evolved an interim seat-sharing arrangement between government and private colleges — 15 per cent of seats in private colleges would be set aside for the NRI quota and the remaining 85 per cent would be split between state-run colleges and private colleges, with each conducting their own admission exams. The DMAT, which the 2007 Act sought to cancel, had now returned, except that it was only for a proportion of seats rather than for all seats in private colleges.
Centralised corruption
What followed next is, of course, well-documented in terms of how the admission scam spiralled into an amazingly complex system of rigging. The MPPEB, now a top-heavy, hydra-headed body, expanded its empire to control an amazing number of exams, including recruitment to government departments and admissions to professional courses. This centralisation was an invitation to corruption and formed the basis of the Vyapam scam. DMAT meanwhile continued with a reduced scope from 2009 but, if we are to go by the suspicions of the Supreme Court, still managed to financially outdo the entire Vyapam network.
There is a cautionary tale here about the regulation of education and how it could backfire. The true irony of the DMAT story is that it may have given the real impetus to the Vyapam scam. And it all started with a heavy-handed interpretation of a well-meaning Supreme Court judgment that aimed at accountability. If both government and private institutions could get it so wrong, perhaps it is time to consider a workable alternative. The Vyapam and DMAT cases give us good reason to do so.
jayant.sriram@thehindu.co.in
