The CBI has busted a network of officials of the Health Ministry and National Medical Commission, intermediaries and representatives of private medical colleges, allegedly involved in “egregious” acts, including graft and manipulation of the regulatory framework governing medical colleges, officials said on Friday.

The agency has named 34 people in an FIR, including eight officials of the Health Ministry, one of the National Health Authority 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 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.

It is 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 and passed them on to middlemen and representatives of medical colleges.

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.

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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