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MEDICAL STUDENTS IN andhra Pradesh wrote the Post Graduate Medical Entrance Test (PGMET) 2014 administered by the state government for a second time in the last week of April. Following a probe ordered by Andhra Pradesh governor and chancellor of the NTR University of Health Sciences, E.S.L. Narasimhan, and an investigation by the state’s Crime Investigation Department (CID) indicating a question paper leak in the entrance exam conducted throughout the state on March 2 — in which 15,000 candidates contested 2,240 seats including 1,500 in government-owned medical colleges — the university’s management was obliged to order a re-exam.
The papers leak scam came to light after complaints by students about glaring anomalies in the results declared. MBBS graduates who wrote the exam were stunned as many candidates with questionable academic credentials secured top marks, and those who were failed in some subjects in the PGMET had been in the ranks of Top 50 in the undergraduate MBBS exam.
A detailed report of a one-man commission of enquiry headed by L. Venugopal Reddy, chairman of the State Council of Higher Education, prompted cancellation of the March exam and arrests of 41 persons including 18 brokers and ‘consultants’, and 23 students.
Continuously rising demand for seats in medical colleges whose number has remained static at 43 — 28 private and 15 government — because of the prolonged agitation for bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh (pop. 84.7 million) into Telangana and Seemandhra, has adversely affected investor sentiment, and dried up promotion of new colleges even as the number of aspirants has risen to 700,000-1.5 million. This pressing demand has engendered a system of brokers and consultants who suborn candidates writing the entrance examination by offering assured seats.
In this particular case, some consultants bribed an employee of the printing press to leak the PGMET exam papers and auctioned them to unscrupulous students writing the exam. “Some desperate parents made online payments of Rs.10 lakh in advance, while others gave blank cheques, and yet others wrote post-dated cheques for amounts ranging from Rs.1-1.5 crore,” says T. Krishna Prasad, director general of the state CID. According to Prasad, the question papers were sold to more than 200 of the 15,000 students who wrote PGMET in March.
Meanwhile, the fact that the re-examination is being conducted again by NTR Health University has perplexed students. “Given the scale and ramifications of the scam, ordering a re-examination is the best option. But given the possibility — indeed probability — that some NTR Health University employees are likely to be involved in the scandal which is under investigation, why is the re-examination being conducted by the university again? There’s a strong possibility the re-exam won’t be conducted fairly either,” says K. Abhilash, president of the State Junior Doctors’ Association.
With Andhra Pradesh under President’s rule and caught up in the hurly-burly of the Lok Sabha elections after which bifurcation will become a reality, nobody has time for such academic questions.
Aruna Ravikumar (Hyderabad)