Govt officials among 34 booked by CBI for manipulation of regulatory framework for medical colleges

The CBI has busted a network of officials of Union Health Ministry, National Medical Commission, intermediaries and representatives of private medical colleges allegedly involved in a litany of "egregious" acts, including corruption and unlawful manipulation of the regulatory framework governing medical colleges.

The agency has named 34 people in an FIR, including eight Health Ministry officials, a National Health Authority official and five doctors who were part of the National Medical Commissioner (NMC) inspection team.

Tata Institute of Social Sciences chairman D.P. Singh, Gitanjali University registrar Mayur Raval, Rawatpura Institute of Medical Sciences and Research chairman Ravi Shankar ji Maharaj and Index Medical College chairman Suresh Singh Bhadoria have also been named in the FIR.

According to the officials, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) recently arrested eight people in the case. These include three doctors of the NMC team who were arrested for allegedly taking a bribe of ₹55 lakh for giving a favourable report to the Naya Raipur-based Rawatpura Institute of Medical Sciences and Research.

The syndicate has its roots in the Union Health Ministry, where 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 CBI FIR alleged.

It alleged that the officials, in collusion 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.

They allegedly located files and clicked photographs of notings and comments made by senior officers.

This critical information pertaining to the regulatory status and internal processing of medical institutions in the Ministry gave an alarming degree of leverage to colleges, allowing them to orchestrate elaborate deceptions to hoodwink the inspection process, according to the CBI.

"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 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.