Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, July 19: After the shame of the girl students being asked to remove their inner-wears before appearing for the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), the admission test to become doctors, the Central Bureau of Investigation has unearthed a multi-state racket offering “confirmed” seats for medical courses for money that operated exactly in the Bollywood film style.
The CBI is now probing if the racket spanned across India and if any qualified doctors appeared as “paper solvers” in place of the students at the examination centres.
After the police complaint by the father of a 17-year old girl who claimed that his daughter was asked to remove her bra because its metallic hook produced beep sounds, the police arrested five women security personnel at the Kollam examination centre in Kerala from where the “underwear scam” came to light.
The CBI sources said on Tuesday that a multi-state racket offering “confirmed” seats in medical courses have been detected with the arrest of eight people from various NEET examinations centres on Monday. The cheating operation – spread across Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Haryana — worked in the way showed in Bollywood blockbuster “Munnabhai MBBS”. Expert paper solvers impersonated students and wrote answer sheets in exchange of huge sums at the NEET exams held on Sunday.
Each seat cost ₹ 20 lakh, of which 5 lakh was given to the person who impersonated the student and solves the NEET question paper. The rest is shared by the middlemen and others. On Monday, the agency made the arrests from Delhi — six of the eight solved NEET papers, sources said.
The mastermind is one Sushil Ranjan from Safdarjung, who deputed “paper solvers” and accepted payments. Eleven people were named in the case and the hunt is on for the rest. Sushil Ranjan has a passport from an address in Delhi’s Safdarjung. Out of eight arrested by the CBI, six are solvers who used to impersonate candidates. These were to appear for seven candidates in centres in Delhi and Haryana.
The probe agency believed that this was just one module of criminals and they are now probing if there are more such modules in operation duping students through a “rigging racket.” The probe agency is now probing if more doctors are involved in this racket.
The CBI has alleged that user IDs and passwords of the candidates were collected by the accused, who made necessary modifications for getting desired examination centres. “They also use the process of mixing and morphing of photographs to facilitate the use of proxy candidates for appearing in the examination,” the FIR alleged. CBI has got custody of all eight accused for five days.
To broaden the scope of the investigation, the agency will now speak to candidates. The role of coaching institutions in this will also come under the scanner, officials said.
To stop cheating, the authorities had tightened security checks for NEET, where wallets, handbags, belts, caps, jewellery, shoes and heels are banned in the exam hall. Candidates are also not allowed to carry any stationery.
But this racket managed to tweak NEET ID cards using morphed photographs so paper solvers could gain entrance in the exam hall. The accused also collected user IDs and passwords of the candidates and made necessary changes to get the desired examination centres.
Meanwhile, five women, including three who asked students appearing for NEET exam to remove bra in Kerala’s Kollam, have been arrested, sources in the Kerala Police have said. Three complaints have now been received by the police on students subjected to humiliating checks before the entrance exam.
The National Testing Agency, however, denied the allegations of the girl whose father first went to the police. The complaint is “fictitious and filed with wrong intentions”, said the NEET exam centre superintendent in Kollam to the National Testing Agency.
The controversy emerged on Monday when the father of the 17-year-old girl told the media that his daughter, taking her first-ever NEET exam, had yet to recover from the “traumatic experience” of sitting for an over three-hour exam without a bra. The father has alleged in his complaint that the girl was asked to remove her bra after the metal hooks beeped during a security check at the Marthoma Institute of Information Technology, the exam centre.
The complaint also claimed that “90 per cent of female students had to remove their inners and keep them in a storeroom.” While the testing centre has denied the charge, the National Testing Agency said on Tuesday that the “NEET dress code does not permit any such activity alleged by parent of candidate.”
Following the incident, the Kerala Higher Education Minister R Bindu has written to Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan seeking strong action against the agency that allegedly forced the girls to take off their bra before allowing them entry into the exam hall. She expressed “dismay and shock” at what she called “naked assault on the dignity and honour of the girl students” who appeared for the NEET examination.
“The shame and shock of this unexpected turn of events have affected the morale and composure of the students whose performance in the test was consequently affected,” Ms Bindu wrote, recommending strong, deterrent action. “I write to place on record that we take strong exception to such inhuman behaviour from an agency that has only been entrusted with the task of conducting the examination in a fair manner”, the minister said.
The Kerala police has registered a case against those who carried out security checks and allegedly asked them to take off their underwear.
NEET-UG is the qualifying entrance exam for admission to Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS), Bachelor of Dental Surgery (BDS), Bachelor of Ayurveda, Medicine and Surgery (BAMS), Bachelor of Siddha Medicine and Surgery (BSMS), Bachelor of Unani Medicine and Surgery (BUMS), and Bachelor of Homeopathic Medicine and Surgery (BHMS) and BSc(H) Nursing courses.
