Uttar Pradesh’s Vyapam scam: 600 fake doctors busted

MEERUT: In a major breakthrough in what is now being dubbed as UP’s own Vyapam scam, two students of Muzaffarnagar Medical College were arrested on Monday night for paying Rs 1 lakh each to the cheating mafia that submitted answers written by experts in place of those by the students themselves. Cops said more names of students will surface after further interrogation.

Nine others, including six officials of Meerut’s Chaudhary Charan Singh University — one of UP’s top universities — have been identified as part of a gang that facilitated large-scale cheating for medical students. The racket, active since 2014, has helped over 600 non-meritorious students pass the MBBS examination and become doctors in the state, police said.

According to the special task force (STF), which busted the gang, the two arrested students were introduced to members of the cheating mafia by a second-year woman medical student who is already under the scanner but is yet to be arrested.


STF sources said the kingpin, in connivance with staff of the university’s answer sheet evaluation department, used to replace students’ exam copies with those meticulously solved by experts. They used to charge Rs 1 lakh-1.5 lakh from medical students and Rs 30,000-40,000 from students of other professional courses at the university.

One of the two students being interrogated, Ayush Kumar, 21, is the son of a doctor at one of Gurgaon’s top multi-specialty hospitals. He is a resident of Panipat in Haryana. The other, Swarnjeet Singh, 22, is a resident of Sangroor in Punjab. Both are second-year students at Muzaffarnagar Medical College. They were arrested after their actual answer sheets were recovered following a tip-off.

“Both the students were charged Rs 1 lakh each in the deal,” Brijesh Singh, in charge of the STF’s Meerut unit, said. “The two met the woman student, their batchmate, following a bad semester exam on March 15. She offered them the deal, as part of which freshly written copies by experts would be submitted instead of answers written by themselves. Later, the girl’s father brokered the deal with the cheating mafia.”

The STF has already sealed bundles of answer sheets of semester examinations held in 2017. “More names of students will come up once we scan previous years’ answer sheets,” Singh said.

Apart from kingpin Kaviraj Singh, five university employees have been booked. Among them, staffer Pavan Kumar and two contractual employees, Kapil Kumar and Sandeep, have been arrested. Another staffer, Salek Chandra, and a former employee, CP Singh, are on the run.

The task force has also written to the state government requesting a special investigating team be set up.

Ex-student leader, 32, is kingpin
At the heart of ‘UP’s Vyapam scam’ is Kaviraj Singh, himself a graduate from Ambedkar College in Meerut. Thirty two-year-old Kaviraj, a resident of Shahpur village in Bijnor, had made contacts in the university following his involvement in student protests at the campus in the past, during which he had emerged as a student leader.

He made acquaintances of university staffers as he frequented them with complaints of other students who looked up to him to get their work done. “It wasn't rocket science to figure out that there were several loopholes in the functioning of the answer book section, and he found out a way to mint money,” a source at the university said.

Investigators corroborated this. The temporary seals in the answer book bundles could be easily tampered with without arousing any suspicion. There was no round-the-clock security, with CCTV cameras defunct and security staff barely bothered. Kaviraj allegedly lured staffers with a handsome share in every deal and is said to have himself made lakhs over the years. “His new house is coming up in a posh area of Meerut. It will be attached during the investigation,” an official said.