<<Citizen Selection Procedure

Click on the names to view details

Ramesh Kumar Verma
Synopsis

One often comes across several incidents where negligence on the part of the doctors proves fatal to the patients. Whenever such issues crop up, we raise a question, albeit in our hearts, about the qualification of such doctors. However, the question dies a slow death just like the newspaper reports that move from the first page to the second and so on, until a fresh case arises. However, thirty-three year old Ramesh Kumar Verma decided not to let the issue simply die down and used the Right to Information (RTI) Act as a tool to escalate the matter to the next level. He filed an RTI asking the Medical Council of India (MCI) to revel the names of doctors who were found to have fake degrees and the date on which a police complaint had been filed against them. To his surprise, he found that many doctors on the list were still practicing medicine not only in private hospitals but also in Government hospitals! The issue subsequently opened a can of worms when Verma, a journalist by profession, decided to do several sting operations to get down to the truth and create national level awareness.

Story

While taking the Hippocratic Oath, a doctor promises to keep his patients away from “harm and injustice.” But unfortunately, often the greed for money and status—in India, a doctor is still considered to be next to God for he saves lives—results in the contrary. Of late, there has been a surge in the number of incidents where negligence of doctors has led to severe medical complications and even death of patients, thus posing a serious question at the medical profession itself. Though this potent issue touches the lives of everybody, we never bothered to seek answers to our questions. However, Ramesh Kumar Verma, a journalist by profession, decided to pursue the issue further with the help of the RTI Act. Thus what began as a pursuit to reveal names of fake doctors led to a much deeper revelation of corruption in organizations, which had a serious and direct implication on the life of the common man.

“I decided to raise this issue because it is pertinent to everybody. Whenever we hear such news, we naturally point fingers at the doctors and question his capabilities. So I thought why not ask the Medical Council of India (MCI) about the authenticity of the degrees held by doctors,” says Verma. Therefore, he approached the MCI and asked them to provide him with the names of doctors who were found to have fake degrees along with the details of the fake degree, addresses and the date on which a police complaint had been filed against them. However, the journey was not all so smooth for Verma, who had to face several obstacles in his pursuit.

At first, the MCI was reluctant to file the RTI, and when it did, it gave him an incomplete list. Verma also had to knock on the doors of the Central Information Commission (CIC) to get the required information under his RTI application. After much deliberation, the MCI provided him with a list that consisted of 53 names of doctors across India, whose degrees were found to be fake on verification in the last 15 years in November 2006. The list also had details of degrees that were found to be fake/forged.
To Verma’s surprise, while some doctors on the list had fake senior secondary certificates that made them ineligible for entering medical colleges at the first place itself, the others had bogus medical degrees obtained from foreign universities. The MCI had clearly stated in the covering letter that accompanied the information that it was not its responsibility to declare a degree or certificate fake/forged. It was the duty of the Indian missions abroad to verify the degrees and it was the issuing authority’s responsibility to declare the degree fake or forged. Normally, based on the information received from the issuing authority, the MCI reports the matter to the Delhi Police Crime Branch if the degree/certificate is found to be fake and an FIR is finally registered for further action.

However, Verma was not satisfied with the information that he received because he found the list too short to be true. Sensing something fishy, he decided to file another RTI application, this time with the Delhi Police to verify the MCI’s list. In that RTI, he requested for the details of those doctors whose degrees MCI had found to be fake and had forwarded to the Crime branch for further action. The Delhi Police, on the other hand, gave him a list of 92 doctors, including the names provided by the MCI! There was a difference of almost 40 names. “It was then that I realized that a deeper nexus existed also involving MCI officials and the Police,” says Verma. This was just the tip of the ice-berg.

This made Verma more curious to know what action was being taken against such doctors by the Police. On further investigation he found that those doctors were still practicing medicine. “The worst part was that these doctors were not only practicing in private hospitals but in Government hospitals as well, thus risking the lives of many innocent people,” says Verma. One such doctor was Dr. Shiv Kumar Kaushik whose MD degree was found to be fake. However, he had been working as a Senior Medical Officer (SMO) for several years in a government hospital in Jind district of Haryana. Another startling case was that of Dr. Gopesh Tiwari, who was employed with a big cancer hospital in Rajasthan called Soni Cancer Hospital. These doctors had been practicing medicine for several years without a proper medical degree and had been now raised to senior positions.
Some doctors had even gone abroad and were practicing medicine there.

Even this failed to satisfy Verma who felt something amiss. The question that was rattling in his mind was – if the degrees were found to be fake and a case had also been registered, then how were these doctors practicing medicine so openly? Therefore, he decided to do a sting operation to find the truth of the matter. “The matter was very serious because the lives of many people were at stake. I realized that to create a desired impact we needed proof and also the matter had to be reported in the national media,” says Verma.

The first sting was done on the Delhi Police. On further investigations, Verma came to know about a police officer who had helped several such doctors to escape the law. The officer had already retired by then. Verma managed to fix a meeting with the officer and recorded the entire conversation on a hidden camera. “I told him that my younger brother was caught up in a fake degree case and he had to help because he had done so in the past,” says Verma. The police officer then got talking and revealed everything, from how the entire nexus works to who all are involved from top to bottom. He revealed that everybody from the Police, MCI and also the judges could be fixed for an amount, and at the end his brother would be given a clean chit in the case. The officer said that entire deal could be set for Rs 2-2.5 lakhs.

Meanwhile, a sting on the MCI was also conducted. Verma and his team met the officer responsible for registrations at the MCI, and posing as a client asked him to give green signal to his brother’s medical degree that was fake. During the conversation, the officer accepted that such things used to happen in the past, but not now. However, he revealed that there were several doctors who held bogus degrees and were big doctors now. It was crystal clear by then that everybody from the MCI to the police were involved in this scandal, and there was no consideration for the lives of the common man at any stage. The sting was aired on IBN 7 and CNN IBN in October 2007, and had a wider impact.  

The sting had raised several questions on the working of such “prestigious” organizations in everybody’s mind.

  • One, why was there discrepancies in the lists provided by the MCI and the Delhi Police. Was the list exhaustive because the registration officer at the MCI had said that there were thousands of doctors who were practicing medicine illegally?   
  • Two, why was there a delay in filing an FIR by the police? There was a case where the MCI had found that the degree of a doctor fake in 2002 but the police filed the case only in 2004 – two years after it was first reported.
  • Three, why was not any substantial action taken by the police when such a case was finally filed and crime in question was heinous.
  • Four, why were the certificates of the doctors not verified when these doctors were employed in the Government hospitals. For example, Dr Pravesh Raj was working with the Railway Hospital in Yamuna Nagar (Haryana) for several years with a fake MD ‘Phy’ degree.

The sting had the desired effect and everybody from the people to the police had woken up from their deep slumber. It had managed to stir the entire system. The police appointed special officers to take up thorough investigation of the case. Reportedly, the court was also directed to speed up such cases involving fraudulent doctors. As a result, while some tainted doctors were forced to resign from their posts, others simply disappeared. The larger impact was that people got to know about the reality of such doctors, and about how the taxpayers’ money was being wasted on paying salaries to such doctors employed in Government hospitals. It also helped saving many innocent lives that could have been affected if these doctors continued practice.

Till now, though the existence of such doctors was an open secret, nobody could pinpoint them because of lack of proof. With the help of the RTI, Ramesh Kumar Verma was not only successful in exposing such doctors and also the scandal that facilitated their existence. “Though several questions still remain unanswered, the RTI helped me in bringing out the truth to a large extent. This could not have been possible without the RTI” says the crusader Verma.