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NMHP scam: Charge sheet spills the beans on racket giving jobs to officials’ kin
Anti-corruption bureau exposes bending of rules and use of fake degree certificates.
A charge sheet filed by the Rajasthan anti-corruption bureau (ACB) has laid bare bending of rules and use of fake degrees for giving jobs to officials’ relatives in the health department under the National Mental Health Programme (NMHP) in 2015.
Between May and July in 2015, 56 people were appointed under NMHP and of them, 25 were ineligible, the ACB investigation found. According to the 1,938-page charge sheet filed on September 12, eight of them were relatives of health department officials and of the owner of a placement agency engaged for the programme. HT has a copy of the charge sheet.
The NMHP recruitment scam surfaced in March 2017, almost two years after the appointments. ACB registered a case on March 31, 2017, and began investigation. During the probe, the bureau found irregularities in the programme and arrested eight people, including former director of health services Dr BR Meena. The eight have been in jail since July this year.
The then chairperson of NMHP screening committee and IAS officer Niraj K Pawan is also an accused in the case. ACB is waiting for sanction letter from the department of personnel and training (DoPT) to prosecute him. Two relatives Pawan’s wife got jobs in the programme. ACB had written a letter to DoPT in October 2017.
Pawan said, “The allegations of the anti-corruption bureau are fake and concocted. If my wife is Saini, it doesn’t mean that every Saini is my relative. Those who had joined had left the programme. There is no solid evidence against me in the case.”
The charge sheet mentions that three of the appointed people submitted fake degrees. They have also been arrested.
The scam didn’t stop with recruitment. The relatives of health department officials and of the placement agency owner were posted in Churu, Jhalawar and Chittorgarh districts but they did not report for work there; they marked their attendance in Jaipur and got salary for not doing anything, said Hema Ram, ACB officer who investigated the case.
The ACB charge sheet tracks the programme from the time a project implementation plan (PIP) was sent to the union health ministry to run the programme in 12 districts – Jodhpur, Jhalawar, Bikaner, Ganganagar, Banswara, Nagaur, Sawai Madhopur, Bhilwara, Churu, Jhalawar, Baran and Dungarpur – on June 15, 2014. Dr Ramavtar Jaiswal was appointed as the nodal officer of the programme.
The Centre approved six districts on December 11, 2014, but when the programme rolled out, three districts – Chittorgarh, Hanumangarh and Jaipur – that weren’t on the list of approved districts were added without the Centre’s permission. Ram said the irregularities began from there.
The health directorate then issued a tender for a placement agency to provide for each district six psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, psychiatric nur- ses, psychiatric social workers, community nurses, monitoring officers, case registry assistants, and ward assistants, as well as eight community health workers.
The tender document didn’t mention a parameter for the agency but when four placement agencies bid for it, three of them were rejected on the turnover criterion, and employee strength was added later. This left only one agency in the bidding process – Messrs Dixit Computers.
The ACB officer says the directorate should have gone for re-tendering after three companies were eliminated from the bidding process.
According to the charge sheet, Dixit Computers, owned by Suneet Dixit, had earlier got a contract for the National Programme for Prevention and Control of Fluorosis. Dr Jaiswal was the nodal officer of this programme, too.
In the investigation, it em- erged that Dixit Computers was blacklisted by the health directorate for one year. The investigation found that Dr Jaiswal, statistical officer Rajendra Sharma, assistant accounts officer Buddhi Prakash Tailor, and Dixit colluded to dilute eligibility criteria for relatives of the officials.
