The Quint’s expose unravels the money trail in the Vyapam scam. The trail starts with the students looking for out-of-turn admissions who fork out money to middlemen, who in turn pay their political bosses. In this first of the three-part investigation, we show how the Vyapam scam dwarfs other scams in its scale and breadth.
- Scale and breadth of Vyapam scam dwarfs other scams in India.
- Slush money’s trail leads to at least five of Shivraj’s ministers
- IT department’s files implicate BJP MLAs and a Cong MLA
- Scam involved as many as 25 kingpins
Rarely do cases of corruption in government surprise Indians, but Madhya Pradesh’s yet-to-be quantified Vyapam scam, which could run into thousands of crores of rupees, has shocked people across the state and several parts of the country for two reasons: its sheer extent involving at least five ministers in the Shivraj Singh Chouhan regime, which was earlier thought to be efficient and capable of delivering good governance, and a host of BJP MLAs and state-level RSS functionaries and the rather unusual number of deaths of some accused persons, including witnesses.
Vyapam is Even More Stunning Than 2G, CAG and CWG Scams
The scandal, which has stunned the Shivraj Chouhan government and brought to question his continuation as chief minister, left behind a money trail that leads to the doors of at least five ministers, two of whom were arrested over the past few months and remain lodged in jail for being alleged beneficiaries.
The two are Lakshmikant Sharma, the minister who headed the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board (otherwise known in Hindi by the acronym Vyapam) before he was arrested and thrown into jail and Jagdish Devda, who held the transport portfolio before his name surfaced in the scam. The other three ministers, including one who was earlier in-charge of the department of school education, cannot be identified for legal reasons as no police action has been taken against them yet.
IT Dept’s Files Implicate BJP MLAs and a Cong MLA
The Income Tax department has prepared its own files on the scale of kickbacks that some ministers and RSS leaders received from the scamsters. But to be fair, BJP ministers and MLAs alone were not the only beneficiaries or bribe-givers. Congress legislator Phundeylal Singh of Pushprajgarh in Anuppur district bribed Vyapam officials to secure his son Amitosh’s admission to a medical college. Singh remains in hiding, though his son was arrested and is in jail.
Scam Involved 25 Kingpins
Documents accessed by The Quint indicate that at least one of about 25 kingpins of this gargantuan fraud in admission to medical and engineering colleges and government departments maintained elaborate Excel sheet records of the amount of money they received from each student-candidate and job aspirant, the total amount they collected each month, the kickbacks paid to a host of bureaucrats heading different departments under Vyapam, senior police officers who were on the take and ministers to whom huge amounts of money, often several lakhs at a time, would be routed to through their personal secretaries.
The scale and magnitude of the scam and the impunity with which the kingpins operated at the higher echelons of the Shivraj Chouhan government can be gauged by just one example -- the involvement of some officials in the chief minister’s office, including his then private secretary Premchand Prasad.
Part Two of the investigation looks at how the money trail in the scam was revealed in Excel documents by at least one of the accused.
Part Three shows that the going rate for a college seat was anywhere between Rs 10-20 lakh, and Rs 40-50 lakh for low-level government job.
More on The Quint’s coverage of the Vyapam scam:
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