Rouse Avenue Court on Monday granted bail to three accused arrested for allegedly impersonating as genuine candidates in the NEET entrance exam. It also slammed the CBI for delaying the investigation of genuine candidates.
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Granting bail to all the three accused in the case, Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (ACMM) Deepak Kumar said, “It appears that the investigation in the present case is being conducted at the will and without any supervision of the IO (Investigation Officer).” by his superiors.”
In its statement, the court said, “Till date, there has been virtually no scrutiny of genuine candidates, who were impersonated by co-accused in the FIR of the present case by appearing in the NEET-UG Examination, 2022 on July 17. The only investigation has been on Arshad Malik and Smriti Rai who were the genuine candidates and Arvind Kumar Rai i.e. Smriti Rai’s father who had to appear in the NEET-UG Exam, 2022.
The court also reprimanded the CBI for not doing anything with regard to the information about the hawala operators received from the accused Pappu Singh. There was no progress in tracking down the equipment allegedly used to take printouts of morphed photographs sent by co-accused Sushil Ranjan to Pappu Singh.
While granting bail to the three accused, the ACMM said that the investigation has been completed in the matter of getting information from the accused and the end of the period of judicial custody. The court said that it does not make sense to keep the accused/applicant in judicial custody now. Therefore, it granted bail to the accused Sushil Ranjan, Pappu Singh and Uma Shankar Gupta on a personal bond. 50,000 each with a surety.
Advocate Hemant Shah represented the accused Uma Shankar in the case.
In July this month, the CBI had busted a racket National Eligibility Entrance Test (NEET) during 2022. The exam is conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA) for students who aspire to pursue undergraduate medical courses. At that time, the CBI had arrested several members, including the alleged kingpin, from Delhi and Haryana. NEET UG-2022 was conducted on July 17 in offline mode.
According to the CBI, Delhi residents Sushil Ranjan, Brijmohan Singh, Pappu, Uma Shankar and many other unidentified people used to arrange solvers to appear in NEET exam as genuine candidates at various centers in Delhi and Haryana. In return they used to demand huge amount from genuine candidates.
(with inputs from ANI)
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