Vyapam Probe : CBI Chargesheets 592 People in 2012 PMT Exam Case, Shivraj Singh Chouhan Excluded

File Picture Courtesy : NewIndianExpress

The Central Bureau of Investigation, which is probing the multi-crore medical scam in Madhya Pradesh, has filed a chargesheet against 592 people, including four former Vyapam officials in the 2012 pre-medical test (PMT) exams, ANI reported .

According to PTI report, The ex-Vyapam officials named in chargesheet include the then Vyapam director Pankaj Trivedi, Nitin Mohindra who was the senior system analyst, the then deputy system analyst Ajay Kumar Sen, and then programmer CK Mishra. The promoters of three Bhopal-based private medical colleges were also mentioned in the chargesheet.

However, Suresh Singh Bhadauriya, who is among the promoters named, told PTI that neither his nor his college’s name was mentioned in the CBI charge sheet.

Among those named, 334 are candidates, 155 guardians of some of these candidates, 46 invigilators during the examination, 26 officials of four private medical colleges, 22 middlemen and two officers of department of medical education, Madhya Pradesh, the officials said.

The two state government officials named in the charge sheet are SC Tiwari, the then director, and NM Srivastava, the then joint director in the medical education department, they said. Of the total people named in the charge sheet, 245 have been made accused for the first time.

The Times of India pointed out that many among those named in the CBI chargesheet on Thursday had been previously let off by the Madhya Pradesh special task force (STF) during its investigation.

This is the second chargesheet to be filed in the case in less than a month’s time. On 31 October, the investigating agency had filed a chargesheet against 490 people in the medical scam, while excluding Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan.

In the first chargesheet, the CBI named three Vyapam officials, three racketeers, 17 middlemen, 297 paper solvers and beneficiary candidates and 170 guardians of beneficiary candidates. Most accused were operating from Bhopal, Indore, Ujjain, Shahdol, Ratlam, and Sagar in Madhya Pradesh.

After Chouhan was kept out of the chargesheet by the CBI, Anand Rai— who exposed the Vyapam scam— had said that the whistleblowers have lost all hope in the state STF and believe only the Supreme Court can help them.

The CBI found that the organised rackets employed students from across the country to allegedly impersonate medical students and appear in recruitment exams since 2008. Middlemen manipulated seating arrangements and forged answersheets in exchange for lakhs of rupees.

The scam in the Vyavsayik Pariksha Mandal (Vyapam) or the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board broke out in 2013 with the arrest of 20 people in Indore.

It quickly snowballed into a major political crisis for Chouhan and led to more than 2,000 arrests, including those of politicians, bureaucrats, and middlemen.

Over 40 persons, including witnesses, accused, and alleged beneficiaries, died in mysterious circumstances ever since the scam was exposed. The Supreme Court then asked the CBI to probe the alleged conspiracy to eliminate suspects booked in the scam and investigate the deaths of 24 individuals.

The CBI rejected the link between the deaths and the scam, and concluded that it was a result of a goof-up by the Madhya Pradesh police. The agency said the police had wrongly included the names of the dead persons as accused in the FIR in the cases.