After Vyapam, NEET scam hits MP, students move court
MBBS admissions in private medical colleges of Madhya Pradesh this year are under a cloud with students and activists alleging large-scale irregularities in the process.
The allegations claim that the admissions helped private colleges mint money due to the incompetence or complicity of the directorate of medical education(DME), which conducted the counselling.
So far, 24 students have moved the Jabalpur high court and 33 admissions have been cancelled following court orders.
But for students like Sheikh Iftar,19, the son of a mechanic who is among those who moved court, time is running out as the academic session has started and they are in limbo.
“I had forgotten that I am in the land which has already seen the Vyapam scam (the multi-layered admission scam that rocked the state). Things have not improved,” he said.
The main grouse of the students is the way the DME conducted the last round of counselling. It started at 6pm after the merit list was announced and students
BHOPAL:
were asked to cover a distance of about 200km to block their seats in different medical institutes.
Vinayak Parihar, an RTI activist and the whistleblower in this case, said, “The Supreme Court had said that admission in the last round would be done directly by institutes, and should be completed by August 10. Ideally, the various college administrations should have been called to Bhopal to fill up the seats. Instead, students were told to rush to colleges to get admission and submit fees. Being a Sunday, no banks were open, which stumped many students. And even when they reached the private medical colleges, they found that seats had already been filled up by those from outside the state from whom colleges could charge whatever fees they liked, unlike by students from the state from whom the fees has been fixed by the government.”
Parihar estimates that close to 250 seats were sold, each for anywhere between ₹40 to ₹50 lakh.
The merit list on the basis of which admissions were made was also fudged, alleged advocate Aditya Sangvi, who is representing 24 students in court.