Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) logo at CBI HQ, in New Delhi, Thursday, June 20, 2019.
| Photo Credit: PTI
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has arrested three persons for allegedly facilitating fraudulent registration of medical graduates who had secured their degrees from overseas but were unable to clear the test that’s mandatory for permission to practice in India.
Ashok Kumar Choudhary and Ashu Kumar were arrested in Delhi, while Arun Prakash Mondal was tracked down to Betul in Madhya Pradesh. It is alleged that they operated as middlemen. They are currently in judicial custody.
The initial CBI probe has indicated that one of the modus operandi adopted by the candidates was to submit forged documents with the State Medical Councils claiming that they were registered with the then Medical Council of India (MCI).
“They would prepare fake pre-2014 registration certificates whose records were not maintained online at that time. The State Councils would seek a confirmation from the MCI. However, the middlemen used to intercept the communication and send bogus responses showing that the certificates were genuine,” an official said. The role of the MCI and State Councils’ officials is also being examined by the agency.
In December 2022, the CBI had searched over 90 locations after registering the case against 73 medical graduates, apart from unknown officials of 14 State Medical Councils and the MCI. There were 21 alleged beneficiaries who had secured their degrees from Chinese institutions, 14 from Russia, seven from Nepal, six from the former USSR, four from Kyrgyzstan, three each from Kazakhstan and Armenia, two from Romania, and one from Nigeria.
The accused medical graduates circumvented the Foreign Medical Graduates Examination (FMGE) conducted by the National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences (NBEMS), which is mandatory for Indian citizens who possess a primary medical qualification awarded by any institution outside the country as, on, or after March 15, 2002.
The scam was unearthed when the NBEMS detected a large number of instances wherein the candidates had not cleared the screening test, but were registered with several State Medical Councils and the MCI.
