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| Protesting against the scam |
This is one scam that the Hindu right wing party ruling in Delhi and in
Bhopal, the capital of the central Indian province of Madhya Pradesh, will have
to live through for a long time. It is so big that most parts of the country
are involved in it and its reverberations have travelled far and wide. The
media in the West have had occasion to report it in great detail. What is
peculiar about the scam is that not only it is a multibillion- dollar scam and
has been running for almost a decade some of its witnesses and accused are
being systematically liquidated. So far 48 such men and women have either died
suspicious unnatural deaths or have been bumped off. Even two deans of an
university in a prominent town of the state, Jabalpur, investigating the matter
died in quick succession one after the other – one was burnt, reportedly by a
laser gun and the other was found dead in Delhi early one morning before. He
was on his way to North-East of the country for inspection of another
university.
The whole scam is about manipulations in examinations and recruitments by
politicians, officials and businessmen of Madhya Pradesh. Known by its Hindi
acronym “Vyapam”, the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examinations Board (MPPEB), a
government body, was established 1982 to conduct examinations for recruitment
to several inferior lower grade positions in state government and for entry
into engineering, medical and other professional colleges in the state. Instead
of being an establishment for conducting fair recruitments and examinations its
officials, including politicians and the minister in charge, indulged in
various malpractices to clear candidates for huge monetary considerations.
This cancer has been festering since mid 1990s. But actual action
commenced in 2007 after an audit team came across large number of
administrative and financial irregularities. Later as many as three whistle
blowers had complained about massive irregularities and corruption in
admissions for tests and then rigging up of the results. The scale of the
malpractices came out in the open in 2013 when it was detected that several
politicians, officials and gangs were involved in the scam. By June 2015 around
2000 people were arrested including the State’s education minister, several
petty politicians, officials of Vyapam including its System Analyst,
bureaucrats, middle men, students and parents. A First Information Report was
also filed against the State Governor who survived arrest claiming immunity
because of his constitutional post. However, his days as Governor seem to be
numbered.
The modus operandi of the scam was varied and it included bribing
officials and politicians, forging answer sheets, allowing impersonators to
write the examinations and even manipulating the seating arrangements in the
examination halls for facilitating impersonators to write the exams. For
pre-medical tests (PMT) practicing doctors were engaged on payment of enormous
sums to them and to fixers who maneuvered their admission at exams to write the
answers. Another curious method was that the examinee would leave several
questions unanswered which would eventually get written with the good offices
of the officials, including the System Analyst of Vyapam. Among the tests rigged were the PMT 2008-13, Pre-PG test for
postgraduate medical courses 2012, and recruitment exams for contract teachers,
food inspectors, police constables and Ayurvedic medical officers
The entire thing blew up in the face of the local chief minister when a
TV channel reporter died soon after interviewing the father of a girl whose
body was found on the railway tracks two years ago. She too was an accused in
the scam for having fraudulently cleared pre-medical tests (PMT) but was done
away with. Soon, thereafter, another girl, once again an accused, was found
dead and floating on a lake. A police constable too committed suicide by
hanging himself after he was questioned by investigators. Recently another suspicious death of a dean of
an university in another town in the state was reported from Delhi. His body
was found in a hotel where he had checked in for the night. He was to leave for
inspection of another university in the North-East of the country. He too was
an investigator in the scam and was reported to have submitted around 200
reports to the investigating authorities.
The chief minister claims to be the whistleblower in this case as he
appointed an investigating team in 2011. But there are three other
whistleblowers that include Dr. Anand Rai, an Optholmologist, Ashish
Chaturvedi, a social activist and Prashant Pande, an IT professional hired by
the Special Task Force investigating the scam. They have had an uneasy life,
living as they do under constant threats of attacks. One of the whistle-blowers
claims to have evidence of involvement of the chief minister in the scam
There have been around 2000 arrests and 45 unexplained deaths of people
connected with the scam generally in the north of the country. With so many
suspicious deaths in quick succession the matter attracted national attentions.
The TV news channels – English and vernacular – went to town reporting every
facet of the scandal. The Indian National Congress, currently out of power in
the State and at the Centre, is crying hoarse for the blood of the chief
minister who is in his third five-year term and runs a Hindu right-wing
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in the state. It also has questioned
Prime Minister Modi’s silence in the matter.
So far the Special Investigating Team appointed by the Special Task
Force created by an order of the Madhya Pradesh High Court was investigating
the mess. As the details of the scam continued to unfold, a Public Interest
Litigation (PIL) petition was filed in the Supreme Court which, after a
hearing, ordered that the matter was serious enough for the Central Bureau of
Investigations to investigate it. It has also agreed to the petitioners’ demand
to monitor the investigations.
That is all well and good. But the scam has fanned the generally
prevailing atmosphere of distrust against government institutions. No one knows
how many fake and undeserving candidates were recruited over the years for
entry into professional institutions or were appointed teachers. While the fake
engineers, medical and dental professionals are practicing their professions
either privately or in colleges and institutions or in private and government hospitals
playing with the lives and wellbeing of the innocent persons, the fake,
unqualified and undeserving teachers are playing with the future of
school-going children. They are all misfits in their trade having hardly any
credentials to practice the highly evolved professions. For a country, people
of which suffer from malnutrition, ill-health and several kinds of diseases, such
ignorant and unscrupulous professionals like medical doctors pose a threat to
their lives. Likewise the undeserving and unqualified teachers are damaging the
future of the indifferently tutored, ignorant and incompetent school pass-outs who
might eventually be of no use to the country.
The only remedy would seem to be to hunt them down wherever they are
after an extended investigation and strip them of their ill-gotten placements
and appointments.
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