The mystery of India’s deadly exam scam
Posted: Sun Dec 20, 2015 7:30 pm
The mystery of India’s deadly exam scam
It began with a test-fixing scandal so massive that it led to 2,000 arrests, including top politicians, academics and doctors. Then suspects started turning up dead. What is the truth behind the Vyapam scam that has gripped India?
For at least five years, thousands of young men and women had paid bribes worth millions of pounds in total to a network of fixers and political operatives to rig the official examinations run by the Madhya Pradesh Vyavsayik Pariksha Mandal – known as Vyapam – a state body that conducted standardised tests for thousands of highly coveted government jobs and admissions to state-run medical colleges. When the scandal first came to light in 2013, it threatened to paralyse the entire machinery of the state administration: thousands of jobs appeared to have been obtained by fraudulent means, medical schools were tainted by the spectre of corrupt admissions, and dozens of officials were implicated in helping friends and relatives to cheat the exams.
The Vyapam scandal began as an old-fashioned scam in a country with a long and storied history of corruption. Officials at the testing agency, along with their political backers and a network of fixers and touts, had charged preposterous sums of money to guarantee candidates either a government job or admission to a state medical college by fixing the results of the entrance examinations. Cheating of this sort was not a new phenomenon – but the enormous scale of the racket, the involvement of top government officials and medical colleges, and the alleged murder of suspects made the Vyapam scam into an explosive political controversy. The four-week long summer session of the Indian parliament in 2015 was completely paralysed by demands from the opposition Congress party for the resignation of Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief minister of Madhya Pradesh.
FULL ARTICLE :-
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/d ... -exam-scam
It began with a test-fixing scandal so massive that it led to 2,000 arrests, including top politicians, academics and doctors. Then suspects started turning up dead. What is the truth behind the Vyapam scam that has gripped India?
For at least five years, thousands of young men and women had paid bribes worth millions of pounds in total to a network of fixers and political operatives to rig the official examinations run by the Madhya Pradesh Vyavsayik Pariksha Mandal – known as Vyapam – a state body that conducted standardised tests for thousands of highly coveted government jobs and admissions to state-run medical colleges. When the scandal first came to light in 2013, it threatened to paralyse the entire machinery of the state administration: thousands of jobs appeared to have been obtained by fraudulent means, medical schools were tainted by the spectre of corrupt admissions, and dozens of officials were implicated in helping friends and relatives to cheat the exams.
The Vyapam scandal began as an old-fashioned scam in a country with a long and storied history of corruption. Officials at the testing agency, along with their political backers and a network of fixers and touts, had charged preposterous sums of money to guarantee candidates either a government job or admission to a state medical college by fixing the results of the entrance examinations. Cheating of this sort was not a new phenomenon – but the enormous scale of the racket, the involvement of top government officials and medical colleges, and the alleged murder of suspects made the Vyapam scam into an explosive political controversy. The four-week long summer session of the Indian parliament in 2015 was completely paralysed by demands from the opposition Congress party for the resignation of Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief minister of Madhya Pradesh.
FULL ARTICLE :-
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/d ... -exam-scam