Shivraj's vyapam woes

Rakesh dixit

Arguably, the February 2015 has been the blackest month in the political history of Madhya Pradesh for several reasons.  For one, on February 25, the embattled Shivraj Singh government facilitated safe passage to the tainted governor Ram Narsh Yadav by the state plane from Bhopal to New Delhi a day after an FIR was lodged against him for forgery in the forest guard recruitment test conducted by the professional examination board. For another, next day, the ruling party’s brute majority ensured scuttling of the budget session barely four days after its commencement and a day after the budget was presented. Thirdly, on February 26, Congress leader Digvijaya  Singh made public the detail of the calls and SMSes  of the chief minister’s wife Sadhna Singh to jailed mining baron Sudhir Sharma recommending  a candidate’s appointment  for contract teacher. 

The chief minister hit back immediately. On the last day of the month, a paranoid BJP government dug out nine-year-old inquiry report on alleged irregularities in appointments in the state assembly between 1993 and 2003 to lodge an FIR against the then chief minister Digvijay Singh  and the then speaker   Sriniwas Tiwari. Taken together, all these developments unmistakably suggest that the Shivraj Singh government is rattled like never before in the 12years of the  BJP rule, thanks to the probe into the PEB scam that appears to be inching towards  the chief minister. 

Entire state is caught in the vortex of political storm caused by the PEB scam, with fate of  the governor all but sealed and that of the chief minister in  the doldrums.

Now all eyes are on the whistle-blower Prashant Pandey, a cyber expert, who has threatened to furnish clinching evidence before the Delhi High court about the scam. On his petition, the court has forestalled Pandey’s arrest by Bhopal police which had been after him ever since evidence against the chief minister were made public by the Congress on February 16.  The police suspect that Pandey photocopied all the data retrieved

Madhya Pradesh has been no stranger to political swindles that shook successive chief ministers since the state was formed in November 1956. But the multi-billion rupee professional examination board (PEB) scam that has been rocking the state politics for over a year is unparallel for its humongous size and complexity.

It involves chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan as a suspected beneficiary of the mind-boggling fraud committed on thousands of aspiring medical students and job-seekers for various government posts.  It is also linked to governor Ram Naresh Yadav whose son and OSD allegedly took money in the premise of the Raj Bhawan to get candidates cleared fraudulently in the contract teacher test conducted by the PEB.

Former personal assistant (PA ) of the chief minister is also accused. Only, Ram Naresh Yadav’s ex-OSD Dhanraj Yadav is in jail whereas Chouhan’s ex-PA Prem Prasad is on bail.        

Asia biggest scam

AICC general secretary Digvijaya Singh, who has been vigorously pursuing the multi-layered scam to nail chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, dubs it the biggest political rip-off in Asia. Cabinet minister Uma Bharti, whose name has also figured in the scam, says it is bigger than the fodder scam of Bihar. She supports the Congress  demand for a CBI probe into the scam, much to the discomfiture of her own party.

The chief minister is facing unrelenting Congress pressure to step down following allegation that he had crucial evidence tempered with to save his skin in the scam. On February 16, senior Congress leaders Kamal Nath, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Digvijay Singh, PCC chief Arun Yadav and leader of opposition Satya Deo Katare addressed a joint press conference on the issue in Bhopal.  Senior supreme court lawyers KTS Tulsi and Vivek tankha, who have fought for Digvijay Singh in the courts on this issue were also present in the meet.

They accused the chief minister of being directly involved in the scam. They alleged that Chouhan had an original excel sheer having his name in 48 places deleted. The excel sheet was allegedly procured from the hard disk of the then PEB system analyst Nitin Mahindra who is in jail.  Mahindra had mentioned names of all those who had recommended admissions and appointments  for various tests through PEB in the excel sheets.

The chief minister has, of course, denied all the allegations against him and described them as a conspiracy of the Congress to malign his image. Digvijay Singh has dared the chief minister to get him arrested if the Congress’s allegations are proved incorrect. He has filed an affidavit  before the special investigation team (SIT) monitoring the investigation ,saying  he was ready to be arrested if his  allegations are proved wrong.

The AICC   general secretary says the Congress will not rest till a CBI probe is ordered into the scam. The BJP is equally determined to foil the Congress ‘campaign to corner the CM.

Since February 16, the scam is once again in sharp focus of the media with both sides hitting at each other.

Go ahead for action against Governor

Meanwhile, the MP high court chief justice AM Khanwilkar’s go-ahead to the Special Investigation Team (SIT) to quiz the governor for his role has added a new dimension to the investigation. The SIT has recommended to make the governor a co-accused under section 120 (B) for entering into criminal conspiracy.  SIT head justice Chandresh Bhushan has said in his report to the court that the governor could not have been unaware of the fact that his son took Rs 3lakh to get 10 candidates cleared in the contract teachers’ test. One of the accused in the case had revealed that he had paid Shailesh Yadav the money in the premise of the Raj Bhawan.  The police are in the lookout for Shailesh in his home town Azamgarh, UP.

With the chief minister and the governor facing the scam heat, the Congress is optimistic of retrieving its lost ground in the state. Following a series of debacle in the state from assembly to Lok Sabha to recently held local body elections, the Congress in the state is staring at an existential crisis.

Mutual recrimination between the Congress and the BJP gives an impression as though the whole scam is a handiwork of the ruling party politicians only. More so, as names of some RSS leaders have also cropped up as suspects.

Congress’s focus on cornering the chief minister further buttresses this impression. But this is only partially true.

Bureaucratic-politician nexus

The most crucial fact being lost sight of in the whole murky affair is that the PEB scam is a shocking manifestation of the rupture in the admission and recruitment system which the state’s bureaucracy has been nurturing for decades for its own selfish end. 

A retired bureaucrat, who has worked closely with Shivraj Singh Chouhan, says he cannot say to what extent, if at all, the chief minister is involved in the scam. “But from experience, I can say that he is paying the price for giving the bureaucracy too long a rope.”

According to him, one of the secretaries in the CM office, who is viewed as Chouhan’s Man Friday, is responsible to a great extent for the mess the chief minister finds himself in.

Another retired IAS officer points out that unbridled powers vested with the PEB was the root cause for the loot to happen through its officers in collusion with middlemen, politicians and bureaucrats.  

PBE: fountain of corruption

Massive corruption spawned by the PEB is traceable to the genesis of the board.  In 1970 the state government formed a board to conduct entrance examination for the government medical colleges. Another board was formed in 1981 for engineering colleges. The PEB, which was formed in 1982, replaced both these boards. With commercialisation of professional education in 2002 insiders breached the system for fraudulent admissions.

Proliferation of private medical and engineering colleges from 2004 onwards paved way for the PEB to start conducting examinations for 50 percent of their seats. Here the college owners played a trick. They got clever “scorers” to appear for these tests. On clearing the test they would withdraw on the last date leaving the field open for the promoters to sell the seats for hefty donations.

The private medical colleges also started post-graduation courses infiltrating into the government colleges through unfair means.

Lure of the lucre in admissions

Why admissions in medical colleges have become a lucrative business for the politico-bureaucratic nexus has to be understood in the backdrop of the poor healthcare, corruption and centralised licensing power in the state.

Madhya Pradesh has only ten medical colleges- six government and four private. Former union minister Jyotiraditya Scindia got approved another medical college in his parliamentary constituency-Shivpuri- but the state government is dithering on allotting land for the proposed project.

Poor health infrastructure

Madhya Pradesh has a doctor-population ratio of 1: 18650 (roughly 1:300 in Europe). Newly qualified post graduates earn approximately 20times the per capita income of the state. Therefore, privileged parents are willing to plough big money in their wards’ medical education. Post graduation costs up to Rs 4 crore in a state-recognised private medical college in Madhya Pradesh. It is much cheaper at Rs 75 lakh to secure a seat in a government college through scam network.

India is the only country where sale of medical seats by private medical colleges is part of official policy. It means ability to pay counts more than merit. The Medical Council of India (MCI), which regulates the sale of medical seats, is itself systematically corrupt.

Issuing threats of de-recognition to the state’s medical colleges from the MCI is an annual ritual. Despite poor infrastructure and acute shortage of medical and para- medical staff, the medical colleges survive the de-recognition threats through greasing the palms of the MCI officials. It suits the politician-bureaucrat nexus fine to keep the healthcare poor and number of medical colleges limited. For, stake for admission in these colleges remains high in terms of money extorted from private medical college owners who, in turn, charge phenomenon donation from students.

The nexus has a direct bearing on the state’s healthcare. MP has the highest infant mortality rate (IMR) at 54/1000 and second highest maternal mortality rate (MMR) at 220/one lakh in India. With over 60% child malnutrition, Madhya Pradesh is compared with sub-Saharan states in hunger parameters.  Yet, in the same state, income tax raids on the premises of two former health directors –Yogiraj Sharma and Ashok Sharma--yielded assets worth several hundred crores. The Central-sponsored National Rural health Mission (NRHM) is the biggest source of loot for the corrupt in the health department.

How greed soared

The ill-gotten money earned through admission-rackets whetted appetite in the political-bureaucratic nexus for bigger money.  The mafias looked for more avenues to satisfy their ever-growing greed. This became possible in 2007 as the BJP government handed the PEB the recruitment examinations for the personnel for various departments including those of semi-government and public sector units. Till then, the state public service commission used to conduct these examinations.

Recruitments to 40 departments are controlled by the board.  Opportunities to manipulate the system for filling the government departments with bogus candidates have become immense. Recruitments of contract teachers and police personnel have proved particularly more lucrative because number of candidates in the two departments was quite high. No wonder then that most of the accused including bureaucrats arrested for recruitment fraud were linked to the tests for contract teachers and police personnel.

Earlier these recruitments used to be organised through respective departments. Corrupt officials in the departments would strike deals with the racketeers to get chosen candidates cleared. The clandestine operations would go on smoothly, barring occasional rumblings from the candidates who thought they were cheated. But such complaints were too few and far between to warrant serious media attention.

Manipulating recruitment norms

In fact, smoothness of the admission-recruitment racket emboldened the nexus to tweak the system more audaciously to make their operation smoother.   

For instance, when the 'recruitment mafia' realised that though it could help candidates pass the theory test for police department but it could not help them clear the physical test, they got fitness norms diluted. In some cases they even managed to get the fitness test abolished. The bureaucracy was only too willing to help the mafia--of course, for a price.

While the college admissions fetched the middlemen anything between Rs 5 to 50 lakh per candidate the recruitment racket fetched them Rs 1 to 10 lakh for each candidate.

Enters the kingpin

With the admission-recruitment racket growing into a multi-billion industry, a top power broker in Madhya Pradesh, Sudhir Sharma, decided to control the PEB’s corrupt empire. Sharma’s rise during the 10 years of the BJP regime has been stupendous. He was a teacher in a RSS-run Saraswati Shishu Mandir. When his close friend Laxmikant Sharma became mining minister, Sudhir quit the job and entered into mining business. Within years, he emerged as a top notch mining baron. His wheeling-dealing in the bureaucracy increased. Transfers, postings and appointments in the state government department became his shady side business.

Master manipulator appointed

Leveraging friendship with Laxmikant Sharma, Sudhir got his acolyte Pankaj Trivedi appointed as examination controller in the PEB. Trivedi was a lecturer in an Indore college, so his elevation in the PEB raised many eye brows in the bureaucratic circles. But   Sudhir succeeded in silencing them.  One of Pankaj’s brothers Piyush trivedi is the vice chancellor of the state’s only technical university. Another brother Sudhanshu Trivedi is BJP’s national spokesman.

Pankaj Trivedi turned out to be smarter in system manipulation than even Sudhir had imagined. He managed to buy all the key functionaries in the board, notably chief system analyst Nitin Mahindra, assistant programmer C K Mishra, Ajay Sen and Santosh Gupta.

How fraud was committed

They colluded to subvert the PEB functioning broadly in three ways to allow the massive loot continue with impunity. 

Impersonation:  An impersonator is one who writes an exam on behalf of someone else. They are brilliant students who can score very high marks. The concerned officers on the examination board would change the photograph back to that of the original candidate after the exam. The student would end up passing an exam which he or she never appeared for. The impersonators would be paid a hefty amount for securing the seat. 

Engine and bogie system: A person would be fixed by people on the board whose work would be like that of an engine. He would be seated strategically between two other candidates who wanted a seat. The engine would help them copy from his own paper. The examiners would be  usually bribed to fix the seating arrangements.

OMR sheets: The chosen candidates would be asked to leave their answer sheets blank. They would be randomly given high percentages after the exam. Concerned authorities of the board then would file an RTI demanding to view those exact answer sheets. They then would fill in the answers in the OMR booklet according to the marks the candidates had already been given. This would be done so that if someone were to ever check those answer sheets, there would not be any loopholes that could give them away.

For years, Pankaj Trivedi and company got away with cheating thousands of deserving medical students and job aspirants, primarily because they were secure in the belief that Laxmi Kant Sharma, who was also technical education minister, was protecting them. Although the PEB is supposed to be a self-financed, autonomous body with a senior IAS officer as chairman, it was Trivedi and company who called the shot.  The then chairman Ranjana Choudhary was completely in the dark about the dubious goings-on right under her nose.

How the lid was blown on scam

By the time, the scam was unearthed in July 2013, the Trivedi and  company had got admitted over 1000 undeserving students admitted in the state’s medical colleges. Besides, several hundred persons had entered in government jobs after paying hefty cut to middlemen, who shared the booty with the PEB gang. Billion of rupees had changed hands when the crime branch in Indore registered the first FIR in the scam and arrested Dr Jagdish Sagar, one of the kingpins in the PMT fraud.

The arrest followed production of concrete evidence in the fraud by whistleblower Dr Anand Rai in the court.  The Indore bench of the high court also spurred the police to act following a writ petition filed before it by parents of some students who had appeared in the PMT-2013. They pleaded with the court to scrap the test in the wake of the reports that 300 ineligible students had managed to get into the merit list.

The police seized a list of 312 candidates from Dr Sagar’s palace-like house 12 days ahead of the counselling for PMT-2013. 

Till July 2013, there had been sporadic reports that appeared from time to time since 2008 in the state’s media about ‘Munna Bhais’ having got admission in the state’s medical colleges. 

Dr Anand Rai says the PMT scam had been going for at least 10 years.  ‘The first case of impersonation was brought to light in 2004 in Khandwa district. Most of the cases are still running in courts’. 

The scam snowballs

Dr Sagar’s arrest in July 2013 blew the lid on the scam. However, bigger storm was still in store. His interrogation led to arrest of Pankaj Trivedi and company in September 2013. When Pankaj started singing in the police custody, magnitude of the scam began to snowball. He confessed that the scam was not confined to the manipulation in the PMT but also involved forgery and bribery in at least five recruitment tests conducted by the PEB. These included food inspector, milk federation, contract teachers ,Subedar-sub inspector and police recruitment tests.

Given the ever widening ramification of the PEB scam, the chief minister announced to form a Special Task Force (STF) for investigation. The Congress alleged that the STF was formed in a hurry to preclude possibility of a CBI probe into the scam as the CM was aware about involvement of many BJP leaders.  

However, the STF’s prompt actions convinced people about its earnestness and, as a result, the Congress failed to make the scam a potent election plank in the assembly polls held in November 2013. The BJP romped home with a bigger majority.

Once the election was over, embarrassment for the new government began as Pankaj Trivedi started naming influential beneficiaries of the loot at the expanse of thousands of deserving candidates for jobs and admissions. He named his mentors Laxmikant Sharma and Sudhir Sharma as key recommenders for the fake appointments and admissions.  Laxmikant Sharma had lost the recently assembly election. Sudhir Sharma had gone into hiding.

STF  on overdrive

With revelation of the two important names, the scam unravelled with breath-taking speed.  By December 2013, the STF identified 129 accused. They included Dhanraj Yadav, officer on special duty (OSD) to governor, Aurobindo medical college, Indore chairman Vinod Bhandari, his colleagues, IAS officer KK Jain, deputy commissioner RK Mishra, DIG RK Shivhare, IG Sonali Mishra’s brother Bharat Mishra, two state police officers from Gwalior, OSD to Laxmikant Sharma, OP Shukla, and OSD to the chief minister Prem Prasad. Some of them had paid money to touts for securing admission of their wards. Others had acted as tout themselves.

Poignant stories of the ‘criminals’ plight

Subsequent months saw the STF going fast and furious in arresting suspects in the scam. Each arrest led to more revelations and, therefore, more arrests. Boys and girls would be picked up from their homes and brought to the STF office for interrogation like criminals. Some would be accompanied with their parents. Poignant stories appeared in the media as to how some parents had obtained loans after pawning assets to pay to the middlemen.  Photographs of the boy and girls being herded to the police stations would evoke pity towards the accused and anger against the system which brought them to this sorry pass.

Leader of opposition Satya Deo Katare recalls how he was deeply moved by the plight of the arrested students who were suspected of getting admission through fraudulent means.

“ It is pity indeed that poor students suffered the ignominy of arrests while the real culprits are still  out of the law’s reach”, he laments.

According to Katare, the scam has directly hit nearly 3.5 lakh families.

The arrests of Laxmikant Sharma and his OSD OP Shukla created most sensation. While being taken to court, Sharma told mediamen that three IAS officers were behind his arrest. Shukla cryptically said if he opened mouth, it would shake the entire bureaucracy. However, both chose not to divulge names. Incidentally, OP Shukla used to flaunt his fabulous connections in the IAS fraternity when he was an OSD. He was alleged to be a key interface between Pankaj Trivedi and bureaucrats who wanted their favourites appointed in government or admitted in medical colleges.

By April 2014, over 1000 accused including suspected Munnabhais and their wards had been arrested. Number of those absconding was even bigger.

CM’s predicament

A visibly upset Shivraj Singh Chouhan admitted in the maiden session of the assembly after formation of the new government   that the STF had detected 1000 bogus appointments made through nexus of the mafia with the PEB officials. He, however, refused to accede to the Congress demand for a CBI probe into the scam.

His stonewalling the demand for a CBI probe further infuriated the Congress which hit the street with a variety of agitations. For months, the scam rocked the state. While STF and state police were busy arresting and interrogating the suspects across the state, the Congress kept mounting pressure on the chief minister for a CBI probe.

The near-decimation of the Congress in the Lok Sabha election in May last year had a profound bearing on the STF probe.  A cocky BJP, which won 27 out of 29 Lok Sabha seats in the state, maintained that the STF was doing a fine job. The Congress was too demoralised to revive stir against the government.

Meanwhile arrests have continued. So far, more than 160 FIRs have been registered, 1800 persons arrested and over 1200 admissions in medical colleges cancelled. The latest to be arrested among influential persons is Amit Pandey, the husband of the senior IAS officer Amita Vajpayee Pandey. He was held for his role in contract teachers’ recruitment in January this year.

The multi-layered PEB scam is as complex as it is wide-ranging. STF personnel have arrested suspected middlemen and impersonators from many states including UP, Karnataka, Bihar and Delhi.

While the STF is doing its job, the Congress’s main focus is on how to implicate the chief minister in it.

Court steps in to monitor probe

Even as the Congress stir slackened following debacle in the Lok sabha election, AICC general secretary Digvijay Singh has vigorously pursued the case for a CBI probe in the high court. However, his attempts have not borne fruits so far. 

Rejecting Digvijay Singh’s plea for a CBI probe, the MP high court chief justice AM Khanwilkar in November last year ordered to form a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to monitor investigation conducted by the STF. Since then, the SIT headed by retired high court judge Chandresh Bhushan is monitoring the probe and duly reporting the progress to the high court chief justice.

It may take years before the accused are finally convicted, given the sheer complexity of the scam and huge number of accused involved in it.

The scam may have rocked the state but it hasn’t instilled fear in the bureaucracy about corruption. The bureaucracy-politician nexus still endures in the state. Only, it has become a little more cautious following the unearthing of the PEB scam.