Written by Anand Mohan J
Bhopal | Updated: May 22, 2024 07:15 IST
The Central Bureau of Investigation has arrested two of its own officers tasked with probing irregularities in nursing colleges in Madhya Pradesh, after it found that these officers had allegedly set up a cartel that would collect bribes from college officials in exchange for clean chits.
In February, after the Madhya Pradesh High Court asked the CBI to probe alleged irregularities in the colleges, the agency gave a clean chit to 169 nursing colleges, found 65 to be unsuitable, and 74 with a “curable deficiency” in its report.
The CBI filed an FIR against 23 persons in this case, including four CBI officers and nursing college officials from at least four districts. The agency arrested inspector Rahul Raj, allegedly caught accepting a bribe of Rs 10 lakh, as one of 13 accused in the case. It also recovered Rs 2.33 crore in cash and four gold bars during seizures.
According to the CBI, the accused – Deputy Superintendent of Police Ashish Prasad and inspector Rahul Raj from the Anti-Corruption Bureau of the agency – were “leading some teams which conducted inspections in different nursing colleges in different districts of Madhya Pradesh”.
The agency alleged that these CBI officers, “in criminal conspiracy with other members of the inspection team, are indulging in corrupt and illegal practices by giving suitability reports to various nursing colleges otherwise not eligible, in lieu of obtaining huge amounts of bribes from these colleges”.
The CBI alleged that Raj was in “regular touch” with middlemen and shared “the schedule of CBI inspection with various nursing college heads, fixing the bribe amount according to deficiencies of their infrastructure…”
The CBI alleged that the bribe money collected by the probe officers varied from Rs 2 lakh to Rs 10 lakh.
“This bribe money is later shared among CBI officers of the inspection team and the middlemen. Source has also informed that in addition to this amount, Rs 25,000 to 50,000 is paid as bribe to each nursing officer and the specialist attached with the CBI team for each inspection. Each patwari attached with the CBI team is also paid a bribe amount of Rs 5,000 to Rs 20,000. Bribe amount for the nursing officer, specialist and patwari used to be delivered by these private persons on the same day/next day of inspection,” the CBI FIR reads.
The CBI alleged that an accused, Jugal Kishore, the director of an engineering college in Bhopal, was a middleman “mediating between the CBI inspection team and the nursing colleges of districts of Gwalior, Ratlam, Mandsaur and Ujjain”.
Similarly, one Om Goswami, the director of a nursing and paramedical college in Indore, allegedly “mediated between the CBI inspection team and nursing colleges in Indore, Dhar, Khargone, Mandleshwar, Ratlam and Mandsaur”.
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