MEERUT: In a major breakthrough in what is now being dubbed as 'Uttar Pradesh’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. Police 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 varsities, have been identified as being 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
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 that the kingpin in connivance with staff of the university’s answer sheet evaluation department used to replace the students' exam copies with those meticulously solved by experts. They used to charge Rs 1-1.5 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 held by police after their actual answer sheets were recovered after a tip-off.
“Both the students were charged Rs 1 lakh each in the deal,”
Brijesh Singh, in-charge of STF’s
Meerut unit, said. “The two met the woman student, who is 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 conducted in 2017. “More names of students will come up once we scan the answer sheets of previous years,” Singh said.
Apart from kingpin Kaviraj Singh, five university employees have been booked in the case. 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 (SIT) be set up.
