Medical Education Scam Busted: Godman, Ex-UGC Chief, Among 34 Officials Named
The alleged corruption spans multiple states, pointing to a nationwide racket involving approvals, inspections, and recognitions granted to several private medical colleges.
In what it has called as one of the largest medical education scams in India, the Central Bureau of Education (CBI) has busted a nexus of top government officials, intermediaries and representatives of private medical colleges, who were allegedly involved in 'egregious" acts, including graft and manipulation of the regulatory framework governing medical colleges.
The alleged corruption spans multiple states, pointing to a nationwide racket involving approvals, inspections, and recognitions granted to several private medical colleges. As per the agency, the corruption involves top officials from the union health ministry, the National Medical Commission (NMC), middlemen, private college representatives, prominent educationists, and even a self-styled godman, news agency PTI reported.
High-Profile Names Under Scanner:
The scam, unearthed by the Central Bureau of Investigation, has opened the lid on a number of deep links the officials had with each other. The agency named several high profile names in its FIR including,
The central probe agency arrested eight people in the case recently. These include three doctors of the NMC team who were held for allegedly taking a bribe of Rs 55 lakh for giving a favourable report to the Naya Raipur-based Rawatpura Institute of Medical Sciences and Research.
The agency has alleged that Ravi Shankar of the Rawatpura Institute wanted advance information about the inspection. A director of the institute, Atul Kumar Tiwari, also named in the FIR, got in touch with Raval to get the information unlawfully.
Ravi Shankar also got in touch with DP Singh to get a favourable inspection report in lieu of bribes, the CBI alleged and added that Singh delegated the task to one Suresh. There was no immediate reaction from Singh.
Raval had allegedly demanded Rs 25-30 lakh for the information and gave the names of assessors and the date of inspection to the institute officials.
The syndicate has its roots in the Union Health Ministry, where the eight accused officials ran the sophisticated scheme facilitating unauthorised access, illegal duplication and dissemination of highly confidential files and sensitive information to representatives of medical colleges through a network of intermediaries in exchange for huge bribes, the FIR alleged.
These officials, along with the intermediaries, manipulated the statutory inspection process conducted by the NMC by disclosing inspection schedules and identities of the designated assessors to the medical institutions concerned well in advance of the official communication.
The CBI has named the Union Health Ministry's Poonam Meena, Dharamvir, Piyush Malyan, Anup Jaiswal, Rahul Srivastava, Deepak, Manisha and Chandan Kumar as accused in the FIR.
These people allegedly located files and clicked photographs of notings and comments made by senior officers and sent these to middlemen and representatives of medical colleges. The crucial information of internal processing of medical institutions in the ministry gave an alarming degree of leverage to colleges.
The agency has alleged that several middlemen and representatives of medical colleges, including Bhadoria, Joshy Mathew, Udit Narain, Virendra Kumar, and Manisha Joshi, were tapping accused Health Ministry officials for information on NMC assessments. All of them have been named in the FIR.
'Such prior disclosures have enabled medical colleges to orchestrate fraudulent arrangements, including the bribing of assessors to secure favourable inspection reports, the deployment of non-existent or proxy faculty (ghost faculty), and the admission of fictitious patients to artificially project compliance during inspections, and tampering with the biometric attendance systems to falsify," the FIR said.
The CBI has alleged that Bhadoria was cloning artificial fingers to create a fake biometric attendance of doctors in the hospital.
The agency has mentioned bribes running into lakhs of rupees being exchanged between NMC teams, intermediaries and representatives of medical colleges, being routed through hawala and used for multiple purposes, including the one in the name of construction of a temple.
It has also alleged that Jeetu Lal Meena, a wholetime member of the Medical Assessment and Rating Board in NMC, was in touch with Indra Bali Mishra 'Guruji', a resident of Varanasi, who in turn was a pointsman for Virender Kumar, an alleged middlemen for a number of colleges in southern India.
It is alleged that in lieu of information, Kumar gave bribes in lakhs to Guruji, who got it collected through his brother-in-law Shivam Pandey and got it handed to Meena.
Meena allegedly used a portion of the bribe money in the construction of a temple in Rajasthan's Dausa.
One Hari Prasad in Ananthpur, Andhra Pradesh, also worked through Kumar.
Prasad, who arranged dummy faculty and handled NMC affairs for some medical colleges for a fee, had two more partners working for him, Krishna Kishore and Ankam Rambabu who had taken bribes from Venkat, a director of Gayatri Medical College, Visakhapatnam and Father Joseph Kommareddy of Father Colombo Institute of Medical Sciences in Warangal.
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First Published:
July 05, 2025, 15:58 IST
News india Medical Education Scam Busted: Godman, Ex-UGC Chief, Among 34 Officials Named
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