The CBI chargesheet on the Vyapam scam has said that three officials of the examination board in Madhya Pradesh in co-ordination with three racketeers helped hundreds of students cheat their way through competitive medical college exams between 2009 and 2012. As part of the racket, which was busted during the PMT in 2013, general, OBC, SC and ST students were charged differently, the CBI chargesheet said. While the candidates belonging to general and OBC categories shelled out Rs 20 lakh for a seat, their SC and ST counterparts paid Rs 12 lakh and Rs 6 lakh, respectively. The racketeers got Rs 50,000 from students for every roll number altered by Vyapam officials to ensure that scorers — who were accomplished medical college students — and candidates sat one after another in the examination hall. The scorers were from Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar, Maharashtra and Delhi and they were paid about Rs 3 lakh for every candidate they helped cheat in the examination. The task of the racketeers was to co-ordinate the entire operation among the Vyapam officials, medical seat aspirants and medical college students who were the scorers. The names of racketeers Jagdish Sagar, Sanjiv Shilpakar and Santosh Gupta have come to the fore in the chargesheet. Sagar and Shilpakar are post-graduates in medicine. According to the chargesheet, Vyapam principal systems analyst Nitin Mohindra, senior systems analyst Ajay Kumar Sen and assistant programmer Chandrakant Mishra divided the money in the ratio of 40: 40: 20. The racketeers would hand over list of pairs — of scorers and candidates — to Mohindra who would manipulate the roll numbers to ensure that the candidates sat behind the scorers. Mohindra would take the data home in a pen drive and upload the roll numbers on the Vyapam website. Mohindra and his colleagues were tech officials and had access to data related to the examinations conducted by Vyapam. The personal computer of Mohindra was found to have details of 317 candidates whose names were given by Sagar, 92 candidates suggested by Shilpakar and 52 by Gupta, the chargesheet said. A person identified as Tarang Sharma used to receive money on the behalf of Gupta. Sagar, who is based in Indore, had amassed so much property in and around Indore that he had gifted one Honda City car to Mohindra. Vyapam would hold the PMT examination after getting rules formulated by the directorate of medical education (DME) and applications forms filled through the MPOnline portal. Sagar, a resident of Chharenta village in Bhind district, finished his MBBS from the government medical college in Gwalior in 2000, nine years after taking admission in 1991. He did his PG in preventive and social medicine from Indore Government Medical College where he came in contact with Shilpakar who was doing his MBBS. Shilpakar, 37, did his PG in radiology from Gwalior. The CBI submitted one copy of the chargesheet to the special court in Bhopal on October 31, saying the accused would be provided DVDs at a later date in order to save printing of lakhs of pages. With nearly 500 accused, there was a scramble to get copies in court on Wednesday. CBI Special Public Prosecutor Satish Dinkar said the chargesheet with the annexure ran into nearly 40,000 pages. The court posted the matter for further hearing on January 13.
