NEW DELHI: Two mysterious deaths in two days. And add another 32 fatalities all linked to a massive admission and recruitment scam that surfaced in India’s central province of Madhya Pradesh in 2009.
Over the past five and half years, the ‘Vyapam scam’ has racked up a body count that would impress the most ardent crime-thriller writers.
The latest death was that of Dr Arun Sharma, the dean of a Madhya Pradesh-based medical college, his body was found in a Delhi hotel on Sunday morning.
Vyapam is an abbreviation of Madhya Pradesh Vyavsayik Pareeksha Mandal (Madhya Pradesh Professional Education Board), a self-financed autonomous body appointed by the state government in 1970. And so far, victims, witnesses and even a journalist probing the mystery, have died in sudden — and mysterious — circumstances.
While the results of Sharma’s autopsy have yet to be released, all the other 33 deaths have been certified by authorities as “natural”.
On Sunday, Madhya Pradesh’s chief minister, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, announced that every death related to Vyapam scam will be investigated.
The Madhya Pradesh High Court will oversee the probe into the deaths, along with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). A court-appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT) is probing the Vyapam scam and has now been asked to probe mysterious death of television journalist Akshay Singh.
Singh died on Saturday in the middle of interviewing the family of Namrata Domor, a medical student who allegedly jumped to her death from a train. There is speculation she may have been pushed from the moving train.
Initially Vyapam was supposed to conduct only premedical entrance tests for admissions into state medical colleges. A similar board was created in 1981 to conduct pre-engineering entrance tests, and the next year, the two boards were merged to create Vyapam, the professional examination board.
The board’s clout increased over the years as it was authorised to conduct all recruitment exams for posts not covered by the state’s public service commission.
The premedical test scam came to light in 2013, though it was going on allegedly since 2004.
It is not yet established if those behind the scam borrowed the idea of enabling admissions of thousands of candidates to medical colleges through unfair means. These included impersonation and bribery, and were depicted in the 2003 Bollywood blockbuster comedy, Munnabhai MBBS, in which a gangster played by Sanjay Dutt gets admission into a medical college through impersonation.
The Indore Crime Branch arrested 20 people, rounded up from hotels in July 2013. They had come from neighbouring Uttar Pradesh to impersonate candidates. Subsequently, a list containing the names of 317 students was confiscated by the Indore Crime Branch from the Mumbai hotel room of Dr Jagdish Sagar. He allegedly was a middle man in the scheme.
Those arrested so far include Laxmikant Sharma, the former education minister of Madhya Pradesh.
The list of those who died a “natural” though mysterious death include Shailesh Yadav, the 50-year-old son of the Madhya Pradesh Governor Ram Naresh Yadav, who died in March.
Yadav had fixed recruitments of 10 Grade III teachers and paid Rs300,000 (Dh17,370) in bribes to Vyapam officials. Yadav, a diabetic patient, died in his Lucknow house and his cause of death was certified as a brain haemorrhage.
The Vyapam scam was simple.
Participants in the scam would paste the photograph of the impersonator in the admit cards and, after the tests were over, the photograph of the original candidate would return on the admit card.
In some instances, the candidates were asked to spend their entire time in the examination centre and leave the answersheets blank. These were later written elsewhere by experts to ensure the candidate qualified for admission with high marks — enabling admission to the best medical colleges.
The opposition is now pointing fingers at the Madhya Pradesh chief minister as his government appears insensitive to the series of deaths that, according to unofficial sources, have already crossed 40.
They claim Chouhan is ducking the probe by the CBI and has explained that only 228 out of some 350,000 appointments made during his tenure had been affected by the recruitment scam. It had started months before he took over as the chief minister in November 2005.
