Anant Bhan
By revealing the rampant corruption in medical school admissions, the Vyapam scam has further eroded India’s shaky faith in its doctors.
The ongoing Vyavsayik Pareeksha Mandal scam in Madhya Pradesh (commonly known by its Hindi acronym Vyapam) has seen the deaths of a number of people under suspicious circumstances. The rising body count has caused a national furore, forcing the government to hand over the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation to look further into the admissions and recruitment scandal that has been rocking the country. But besides the macabre deaths, the field of medicine in India must brace itself for one other negative fallout of the scam: the already declining trust in medical service providers has now fallen further.
Many medical students have been found to have used, or are suspected to have used, unscrupulous means to be admitted into medical colleges — getting their entrance answer sheets rigged or getting impersonators to write exams on their behalf. The enormity of the scale of such rigging in the Vyapam scam is shocking. One major fallout of the scam is that seats in medical colleges are being wasted. Several scam-tainted students have already been suspended or expelled mid-way through their courses from their colleges. And it is quite probable that there are a number of other medical students who cleared their entrance examinations through fake means and who will be identified in the continuing investigation and expelled.
Sadly, they can no longer be replaced by students who might have been in the waiting list for selection into the course. Losing precious MBBS course seats adds to the criminality of the scam, for healthcare professionals are a scarce commodity in this country.
Read more : http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/vyapam-scam-how-do-we-start-trusting-doctors-again/article7430363.ece
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