Lid off Vyapam-like scam in Meerut

Lucknow: The UP STF has busted a Vyapam-like racket in which two students of the Muzaffarnagar Medical College were arrested for paying Rs 1 lakh each to the mafia that submitted answers written by experts.

Nine others, including six officials of the Chaudhary Charan Singh University in Meerut, 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 more names of students would surface after further interrogation.

According to the STF spokesman, the two students were introduced to the mafia by a second-year woman medical student who is under scanner.

The kingpin of the racket, Kaviraj  Singh, in connivance with staff of the university’s answer sheet evaluation department, used to replace the students’ examination copies with those 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, the spokesman said.

One of the two students is Ayush Kumar, 21, son of a doctor in a superspecialty hospital in Gurgaon. The other, Swarnjeet Singh, 22, is a resident of Sangroor in Punjab.

Both are second-year students at Muzaffarnagar Medical College. They were arrested after their actual answer sheets were recovered.

The STF has already sealed bundles of answer sheets of semester examinations conducted in 2017.

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.