Of the total persons named in the charge-sheet filed in Bhopal court, 245 are new names while the remaining 347 are those who have already been named as accused in the CBI’s October 31 Vyapam charge-sheet which carries probe related to the 2013 PMT case.
Those named in the CBI charge-sheet include four Vyapam officials, chairman of four medical colleges, 11 middlemen, 46 invigilators of examination centres and 17 guardians of beneficiary candidates.
The charge-sheet lists former medical education director (Madhya Pradesh), S C Tiwari, and ex-joint director medical education, M N Srivastava, as the among the key persons.
The four former Vyapam officials are ex-director Pankaj Trivedi, former senior system analyst Nitin Mohindra, former deputy system analyst Ajay Kumar Sen and programmer C K Mishra.
The scam in Vyavsayik Pariksha Mandal (Vyapam) or the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board was exposed in 2013. Students bribed officials and rigged exams by deploying imposters to write their answer-sheets. The scam, which began in 1995, involved politicians, senior officials and businessmen.
The CBI took over investigation following the Supreme Court order on July 9, 2015.
The charge-sheet was connected to the pre-medical test of 2012 – one of several cases of irregularities in examinations conducted by Vyapam.
CBI investigators said organised rackets employed students from across the country to allegedly impersonate medical students and appear in recruitment exams since 2008. The middlemen manipulated seating arrangements and forged answer-sheets in exchange of lakhs of rupees.
The arrest of 20 people in Indore blew the lid off the massive scam, which quickly snowballed into the biggest political crisis for Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and led to more than 2,000 arrests, including those of politicians, bureaucrats, and middlemen.
Over 40 persons, including witnesses, accused, and alleged beneficiaries, have died in mysterious circumstances ever since the scam broke out. These included a son of the then governor Ram Naresh Yadav. Some died in accidents or from mysterious illnesses. The charge-sheet said the racketeers managed to get exam roll numbers in such a manner that a beneficiary candidate was seated right behind a candidate who would help facilitate the cheating.
CBI investigations revealed that these ‘solver’ candidates were recruited from among brilliant medical college students taking coaching in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Delhi, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra.