The bulk of those arrested were from Lucknow’s King George’s Medical University and Kanpur’s Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi Memorial Medical College from where students were picked up and taken into custody by the MP special task force, which is investigating the infamous admission racket in that state’s medical institutions.
These students came in handy for the scamsters to solve the entrance examination question papers for which every hand-picked student was being paid lakhs of rupees.
Among those arrested were also students from BabaRaghavdasMedicalCollege, Gorakhpur, MaharaniLaxmiBaiMedicalCollege, Jhansi and MotilalNehruMedicalCollege, Allahabad.
According to a top source in the UP police, the MP STF had initially prepared a list of some 150 UP medical college students who had come up on their radar as suspects engaged in clearing entrance examination papers.
One of them, identified as Mohit Chaudhary was once arrested by Delhi police for impersonating as a student and cracking the AIIMS post-graduate entrance examination.
“Ironically, Chaudhary was a third-year MBBS student at Indore at that time,” said the UP top cop.
“However, ever since he managed to get out on bail, he has been untraceable,” he added.
“The Lucknow and Kanpur medical colleges had become notorious for providing the highest number of imposters, with expertise in solving question papers,” he claimed.
However, only last month the MP STF picked up Gorakhpur medical college student Satyendra Kurmi while he was in his home in Gwalior.
He was handed back to the Gorakhpur medical college last Saturday after the STF sleuths obtained important leads from him.
The STF team is now on the look out for another Gorakhgour student who has been missing from the college for sometime now.
“The MP STF had arrested five of our students last year and four of them were back after getting bail, while they were in the process of scanning the records of 20 other students enrolled in different semesters of the MBBS program,” AllahabadMedicalCollege principal Dr S P Singh informed the local media.
King George’s Medical University Vice Chancellor Dr Ravi Kant too confirmed the arrest of nine students by the MP STF in connection with the Vyapam scam over the past one year.
The latest arrest was made on July 4, when the MP STF picked up Lucknow student Virendra Bind from his home in Bhadohi district near Varanasi.