RAKESH DIXIT - M.P. Government Turns on Vyapam Whistleblower Anand Rai
First, his wife was suspended from her government job for
having availed child-care leave; now the doctor who helped pull the plug on
Vyapam is being transferred to another town
Rai has been associated with the rightwing Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) since 2005. He was an office-bearer of the Sangh-affiliated doctor’s cell. But he feels let down by the Hindutva organisation. “If the Sangh can stand up for (terror-accused) Pragya Singh Thakur who has brought public disgrace to the organisation, then why did it abandon me when I was exposing Vyapam,” he asks. After he blew the lid off Vyapam, the RSS not only disowned him but withheld the 2012-13 Nanaji Deshmukh award for social service, named after the RSS ideologue, for which Rai was recommended. “The RSS claims to fight for corruption, but till now has (its chief) Mohan Bhagwat said a word on Vyapam?” Rai asks.
BHOPAL: A whistleblower for a decade now, Dr
Anand Rai has learnt to keep his chin up in the face of pressure and
intimidation from the white-collar criminals he has sought to expose. The
Indore-based medical officer has received innumerable threats over the
years and lives today under police protection provided to him by the Madhya
Pradesh
government on the High Court’s orders.
Today, though, the crusader is finally worried – not so
much for himself as for his doctor-wife and their two-and-half-year-old
daughter. On July 19, the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government transferred Rai –
the first whistleblower in the Vyapam scam -from Indore to Dhar, further west in
the Malwa plateau. Two weeks ago, his wife, a gynaecologist, was shifted from
Mhow, a suburb of Indore, to Ujjain.
The health department issued a transfer order on a holiday,
cancelling Rai’s attachment in the regional health and welfare training centre,
Indore. Four years ago, he was posted as medical officer in Dhar district
hospital but, soon after the posting, the department acceded to his request to
attach him to the Indore training centre so that he could be with his wife
Gauri Rai. “Now in the middle of training at the centre, I am being
shifted back to Dhar,” shrugs Rai, who blew the first whistle in July 2013 in
the Vyapam scam that involves dubious medical admissions and job
recruitments involving politicians, senior officials and businessmen. “The
health department says I am not the only doctor whose attachment has been
cancelled. This is a lie.”
He says the way he has been “singled out for harassment” in
the name of transfer “clearly reeks” of the Chouhan government’s “vicious
vendetta”. According to Rai, the Chief Minister “specifically instructed”
health secretary Gauri Singh to issue his transfer order before leaving for
Delhi on Sunday (July 19) afternoon”. Vowing to fight against the
action, he says, “I am not going to take it lying down. I will move the High
Court against the order.”
Rai says he had a foretaste of trouble coming his way in the
veiled threats of BJP spokespersons during TV debates on Vyapam recently. “My
co-panellists Sambit Patra and GVL Narasimha Rao (both from the ruling Bhartiya
Janata Party) would subtly threaten me. One of them would accuse me of being a
murderer. Another would angrily ask how I, a government doctor, dared to
embarrass the establishment on the issue,” he recalls. “These were open and
direct threats. Of course, there have been lots of indirect threats to me to
keep my mouth shut ever since I blew the whistle over Vyapam.” The scam gained its name from the Hindi acronym for the
Vyavsayik Pariksha Mandal – a Madhya Pradesh government-incorporated,
self-financed and autonomous body tasked with conducting several entrance tests
in the state.
Wife penalised : The transfer is the second blow
for Rai in a fortnight. In the first week of this month, the health
department suspended his wife, who was posted as a doctor in Mhow hospital, for
having availed child-care leave. When she threatened to move the court against
the action, the government quickly revoked her suspension, but transferred her
to Ujjain. “Now we are worried about our toddler daughter,” says Rai.
“I fail to understand why the government is punishing my wife and child for my
boldness in exposing the rot in the medical education. What is the government
trying to prove by transferring me?”
Rai says he knew life was not going to be easy for him when,
in 2005, he first exposed unethical clinical drug trials by unscrupulous
doctors of Indore’s Mahatma Gandhi memorial medical college. He was all alone
in the fight against a powerful lobby of medical experts who had no qualms in
treating poor, gullible patients as guinea pigs on behalf of pharmaceutical
companies. Predictably, they ganged up against Rai. “They (the doctor’s lobby) would threaten me — sometimes
subtly, sometimes directly,” he recalls. “Initially I was scared, but, by and
by, I learned to live with threats.”
Today, Rai anticipates more trouble as the Supreme Court is
seized of a joint petition seeking a CBI probe into the rigging of the Dental
and Medical Admission Test (DMAT) for 1,500 admissions in the state’s six
private medical and 16 private dental colleges. The state’s medical and dental
college owners comprise a far more powerful lobby than the doctors involved in
the drug trials.
Rai, who is one of the three petitioners, claims the DMAT
scam involves transactions worth more than Rs 10,000 crore since the test began
in 2006. Going by scale, it is bigger than the Vyapam, which has led to 2,000
arrests amid the ‘mysterious’ deaths of 40-odd people ‘related’ to the
multi-crore rip-off. On July 16, the Supreme Court issued notices to the Union
government and the Madhya Pradesh government on the whistleblowers’
petition. While hearing the petition, the apex court said the DMAT scam
“seems worse” than the Vyapam.
“There is a clear link between the corruption in Vyapam and
DMAT,” says Rai. “The same solvers who would impersonate for candidates in
Vyapam also filled in seats in private colleges, but later surrendered the
seats which were then sold.”
If the DMAT scam also comes under the purview of the CBI
probe into Vyapam, the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government’s troubles are sure to
mount. The tenacity with which the whistleblowers are pursuing the DMAT case
after having succeeded in bringing the Vyapam scam under a CBI probe has
further rattled the embattled state government. The transfers of Rai and his
wife are being viewed as a desperate move to gag the whistleblowers.
Years of living dangerously: Rai, however, is unfazed. “If the
government thinks it can browbeat me into silence, it is sorely mistaken. My
fight against the corrupt medical education system in Madhya Pradesh is not
new,” he says, recalling that he had raised an alarm about irregularities in
medical education way back in 1993 when the zoology paper he attempted in the
Pre-Medical Test was leaked in Gwalior. “My subsequent involvement in student
politics and participation in exposing graft cases prepared me to face threats
and harassments with courage.”
Ironically, Rai has been associated with the rightwing
Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) since 2005. He was an office-bearer of the
Sangh-affiliated doctor’s cell. But he feels let down by the Hindutva
organisation. “If the Sangh can stand up for (terror-accused) Pragya Singh
Thakur who has brought public disgrace to the organisation, then why did it
abandon me when I was exposing Vyapam,” he asks.
After he blew the lid off Vyapam, the RSS not only disowned
him but withheld the 2012-13 Nanaji Deshmukh award for social service, named
after the RSS ideologue, for which Rai was recommended. “The RSS claims to
fight for corruption, but till now has (its chief) Mohan Bhagwat said a word on
Vyapam?” Rai asks.
Incidentally, the RSS ‘renegade’ found a useful weapon for
his fight against corruption in the Congress party’s pet project, the Right To
Information (RTI) Act. He has filed more than 1,000 RTI applications,
including those concerning the mess in drug trials to expose corruption in the
state’s medical education sector.
Rai says he had sensed the rot in the medical education in
2005 when he was pursuing post-graduation in the MGM College, Indore. He discovered
that the students who figured among the top ten in the entrance exam hardly had
any knowledge of the subject. All of them were from affluent families and lived
in a common block of the college hostel. However, he thought he was too junior
to expose the PMT rigging at that time and, therefore, kept quiet. Four years
later, he could not keep quiet when he learnt that some PMT papers were about
to be leaked.
“I immediately tipped off the Indore crime branch. A case
was registered. Later, I filed complaints in similar cases involving
impersonators from other states who appeared in the pre medical test on behalf
of candidates. Since then my fight has continued.” When Rai exposed the unethical drug trials that were going
on in the state, his campaign created a stir across Madhya Pradesh and
even in the national media. However, far from taking action against the
unscrupulous medical experts involved in the clinical trials, the state
government apparently sought to shield them.
Rai mounted pressure on the government for action by
disclosing more and more shocking facts related to the trials. The RTI route
came handy in the fight. Eventually, Supreme Court intervention forced the
Union Health Ministry and the Madhya Pradesh government to take remedial
measures.
Stung by his expose, the state government terminated Rai’s
services in August 2010. He was then a junior doctor attached to the Maharaja
Yashvant Rao hospital of the MGM Medical College, Indore.
A strike by the Madhya Pradesh Junior Doctors Association
was used as a “ruse” for his termination, says Rai, who was one of the patrons
of the body whose other functionaries were suspended for striking work. Their
suspension was revoked after a while, but Rai’s termination stayed. At this, he moved the Indore bench of the Madhya Pradesh
High Court. The court in November 2010 quashed the termination order, asking
the government to reinstate him immediately. The government ignored the
verdict, following which Rai moved a contempt petition. The court slapped a
fine of Rs 5,000 for contempt of court. Even so, the government did not
reinstate him.
Then, in 2011, Rai cleared the Madhya Pradesh Public Service
Commission test and became a medical officer. He was posted to Dhar but was
later attached to a training centre in Indore. The state government seems to
have realised it was a mistake allowing Dr Anand Rai to stay in Indore
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