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Four days after the CBI arrested 16 persons involved in leaking the MD/MS entrance exam paper and large scale cheating, the PGI authorities on Wednesday decided to cancel the entrance examination.
In the absence of the director of the institute, Dr Y K Chawla, sources said the decision was taken in a meeting attended by senior functionaries of the institute including dean Dr Amod Gupta, officiating director Dr Vinay Sakhuja besides deputy director (administration) Chetan P S Rao and others.
Sources said that the decision has been taken keeping in mind the fact that since it is not certain as to how many candidates were beneficiaries of the paper leakage, it would be in the interest of all the genuine candidates, to cancel the exam. However, it has not been decided as yet as to when the exam will be reconducted.
The decision will affect over 7,200 candidates who appeared for the 78 post graduation seats in various departments of PGI at 11 different exam centres in the city.
Despite repeated attempts, Manju Wadwalkar, PGIMER spokesperson, could not be contacted for comments.
On November 10, a CBI team arrested the gang members — including seven girls who were on mostly matriculates and class XII passouts — who were utilising hi-tech gadgets including bluetooth devices, smart phones and buttonhole cameras to transmit questions to other gang members located at nearby hotels.
Serious lapses
The scam has blown the lid off serious lapses on part of PGI authorities in the way the exam is conducted, especially after a similar incident had taken place in 2010 wherein it was revealed that two doctors had gained admission in the prestigious institute after impersonators had appeared on their behalf and had cleared the entrance exam conducted by the PGI.
The same serious questions have been raised once again on the way the exam is being conducted with PGI authorities admitting that they do not have any mechanism to check if the documents produced at the time of filling in the forms are original.
A fact well known to the gang members who produced faked MBBS degrees to PGIMER in order to appear in the entrance exam with an aim of leaking it out.
So far, 16 persons have been arrested in this case including Dr Ghanshyam Reddy, the “expert” who was arrested from Patna and was to answer the questions in the entrance exam.
All the accused are currently under police remand.hi-tech set up
Pushpagir Gurivi Reddy, who was arrested by the CBI from a hotel in Chandigarh on Saturday, turned out to be the kingpin of the racket, which had spread to various cities, including Patna and Hyderabad. Reddy (31) would provide sophisticated equipment like pen-scanners, micro-earphones with blue tooth facility and wireless ear plugs to the students, who had hidden them in convenient places like undergarments, collars and hair bands. Special clothes were ordered for the women appearing in the entrance test and the devices were fixed when the garments were being stitched.
The modus operandi was that soon after the question paper was given to the student, the ‘moles’ would scan the entire paper using the specially designed pen, which had the facility to transmit the same to Reddy and his associates sitting in a hotel in Chandigarh through e-mail. They in turn would send the scanned paper to ‘experts’ in Hyderabad and Patna. “Within minutes, the experts would find out the answers and send them back to the control room of Reddy and his associates in Chandigarh. And he, in turn, would read them out to the girls in the examination centre who would hear them through micro ear phones,” sources said.
Some politician's sons/daughters must be a beneficiary of the cheating racket. To hide them and cut short further investigations, the exam is getting canceled. It s very easy to pick up those who were involved just by interrogation and checking the arrested kingpin's contacts through mobile phone/bank transactions etc and it s feels like our CBI are not intelligent enough to solve even these type of cases. A genuine student who has spent 5 days and 20,000 for this exam is the loser just bcoz PGI had lapses in security and our CBI is dumb!
