After two years of Inquiry as many as 592 people, including four promoters of private medical colleges in Madhya Pradesh, have been named as accused in a chargesheet filed by the CBI in connection with alleged irregularities in a Vyapam case, officials of the probe agency said on Thursday.

Special Correspondent

Those listed included J N Choksey, chairman of L N Medical College; S N Vijaywargiya of People’s Medical College; Ajay Goenka of Chirayu Medical College (all in Bhopal) and Suresh Singh Bhadoriya of Index Medical College, Indore, they said.

While three promoters did not any comment when contacted by PTI, Bhadoriya claimed neither his nor his college’s name was mentioned in the CBI charge sheet.

The chargesheet was filed in a special CBI court in Bhopal in the case of Pre-Medical test (PMT) conducted by the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board or Vyapam in 2012.

The test was conducted for selection to various medical colleges of the state.

Among those named, 334 are candidates, 155 guardians of some of these candidates, 46 invigilators during the examination, 26 officials of four private medical colleges, 22 middlemen and two officers of department of medical education, Madhya Pradesh, the officials said.

The two state government officials named in the chargesheet are S C Tiwari, the then director, and N M Srivastava, the then joint director in the medical education department, they said.

Of the total people named in the charge sheet, 245 have been made accused for the first time. Others have been named in different charge sheet filed earlier by the CBI.

The probe agency is looking into the various cases of massive irregularities in various examination conducted by the Vyapam to select candidates for medical colleges and also for state government jobs.

The Vyapam scam was an entrance examination, admission & recruitment scam that was unearthed in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh in 2013.

It involved scamsters including politicians, senior and junior officials and businessmen systematically employing imposters to write papers, manipulate exam hall seating arrangements and supply forged answer sheets by bribing officials.

The scam involved 13 different exams conducted by Vyapam, for selection of medical students and state government employees (including food inspectors, transport constables, police personnel, school teachers, dairy supply officers and forest guards) where the final results were rigged.

The exams were taken by around 3.2 million students each year, many of whom were actually paid proxies for other undeserving students.[3] It also included an "engine-bogie" system wherein seating arrangements were manipulated so that a paid smarter student was seated between tow others to allow the latter to copy answers from the former.

The scam also led to between 23 and 40 'unnatural' deaths of involved individuals, though unofficial figures run well into more than a 100 custodial deaths including the erstwhile MP Governor's son and deaths in staged road accidents.

Cases of irregularities in these entrance tests had been reported since the mid-1990s, and the first FIR was filed in 2000. However, until 2009, such cases were not thought to be part of an organized ring. When major complaints surfaced in the pre-medical test (PMT) in 2009, the state government established a committee to investigate the matter.

The committee released its report in 2011, and over a hundred people were arrested by the police. However none of the accused have been convicted as most of them either suspiciously died in custody or were released on bail.

By June 2015, more than 2000 people had been arrested in connection with the scam. Laxmikant Sharma, ex-Education Minister (M.P) Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) leader was initially arrested for his involvement in the contractual teachers recruitment scam, based on the information recovered from the Excel sheet maintained by Nitin Mohindra.

Later, he was also booked for irregularities in the constables recruitment examinations; according to the STF, he recommended names of at least 15 candidates for recruitment as constables.

In July 2015, the Supreme Court of India issued an order to transfer the case to the country's premier investigating agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). In the same year.