Ballia nurse recruitment racket: Knock-off appointment letters gave jobs to unqualified candidates, suggests probe

A probe in Ballia reveals 15 fake staff nurse appointments using cloned letters, prompting scrutiny of 5,000 nurse recruitments from 2019-2025.

The joining letter for a staff nurse was replicated multiple times to give jobs to 15 undeserving candidates, who were deployed in the same posts at several health facilities in Ballia district. All the counterfeit documents had the same content as that of the genuine letter, except for the names.

(For representation)

This revelation is from an ongoing probe being done by the nursing section of the Uttar Pradesh health directorate here. Out of the 15 people, two are women who got the jobs of staff nurse.

The probe, still in its nascent stage, however, suggested the connivance of officials and other staff in Ballia, officials said. Now, the appointments of 5,000 nurses who were recruited between 2019 and 2025 are also under the scanner.

Not just counterfeiting the document, the next step—the verification of the fake joining letters by the headquarters—was also managed. To ensure that postal verification of the joining letters goes smoothly, the fraudsters managed to ensure fake confirmation from the address of the directorate. They posted confirmation letters from Lucknow GPO to Ballia with the nursing section of the health directorate as the consignor/sender and the district’s chief medical officer’s (CMO’s) office as the receiver.

The investigation into the issue is being done by two agencies. While police are probing on the basis of an FIR lodged by Ballia chief medical officer Dr Vijay Pati Dwivedi on February 22, the health directorate is conducting its internal inquiry and has put the recruitments between 2019 and 2025 under the scanner. In these six years, 5,768 nurses (2,388 in 2019, 2,470 in 2022 and 275 in 2023) were appointed to government hospitals.

According to the investigation, the ‘cloned’ letters had the same dispatch number, letter head, the signature of the directorate officer and other details, but the name of candidate and were changed.

On February 24, HT published a report on the recruitment racket, which surfaced after an inspection at a primary health centre (PHC) in November. During the inspection, CMO Dr Dwivedi asked a newly recruited staff nurse about the “ratio of ORS to be mixed in water for a patient of dehydration”, which the latter couldn’t answer. The nurse also was not able to answer other related queries as well, which triggered a broader investigation against all newly recruited nursing staff that revealed fraudulent appointments.

During the investigation, the nursing cell officials spotted a change in the post office for sending the verification reply. While the directorate uses Aminabad and Charbagh post offices to send mail, the fraudsters used the GPO to send a letter to the Ballia health office by the name of health directorate.

“We will move phase-wise: the latest recruitment drive will be scanned first. This is in anticipation that the latest batch may have put in maximum effort to dupe the system,” said Dr Ratan Pal Singh Suman, the director general of medical health who ordered the internal probe.

The recruitment of nursing staff is a continuous process since over 20 per cent of the posts remain vacant at any given point. While the selection is done by the UPPSC, the appointment of selected nurses is done by the health directorate’s nursing section.