Ajmer: Rajasthan’s Anti Corruption Bureau has arrested the MDS University VC over an alleged bribe. The Vice-Chancellor of MDS University in Ajmer, Rajasthan allegedly asked for a bribe, in exchange for the allocation of extra seats and a test centre, from a private institution affiliated to MDS University in Nagaur. Dr Ram Pal Singh, the VC, has been arrested by Rajasthan’s Anti Corruption Bureau (ACB) along with middlemen Ranjit Singh and Mahipal Singh.
They were arrested by the ACB on Monday evening. Ranjit, one of the middlemen, was caught in the act taking Rs. 2.2 lakh worth of cash at the official residence of the VC. The ACB got the information about this corruption operation via a private college in Bhilwara. This college had applied for affiliation in December 2018, to which the university accepted to grant affiliation in 2020 after completing the initial inspection.
Afterwards, one of the middlemen, Ranjit Singh, contacted SK Bansal, the owner of the Bhilwara college and asked for a bribe of Rs 2 lakhs, fixing a meeting with the VC as well. The ACB was approached by Bansal and was able to confirm the demand of 1 lakh and started surveilling the VC and Ranjit Singh. During the surveillance, the ACB acquired information about another bribery attempt by the said VC from a private college located in Nagaur. Acting on a tip, the ACB raided the VC’s residence and caught Ranjit accepting the cash of 2.2 lakh and Rs 80 thousand via Google Pay from Mahipal Singh of the Nagaur college.
The trap that caught the MDS University VC
The first public account of the operation came on the evening of Monday, 7 September, when the bureau caught the middleman with Rs 2.2 lakh. “The accused Ranjit Singh was taking a bribe in the name of Vice Chancellor RP Singh, when he was caught red-handed,” ACB deputy superintendent Mahipal Singh Choudhary said, in remarks reported by ETV Bharat that evening.
An ACB team led by Superintendent of Police Samir Kumar Singh then reached the vice-chancellor’s residence and started an investigation to determine his involvement, ETV Bharat reported. The Rs 80 thousand that arrived over Google Pay from the Nagaur college’s side gave the bureau a digital record to set beside the cash counted at the residence, and the files confiscated from the VC office gave it the paperwork on seat allocations and the examination centre against which to test both.
According to ACB officers, the documents of the bribery case along with many other files have been confiscated from the VC office. The mobile and laptops of VC, Ranjit, his driver and security guards have also been confiscated.
It should be noted that the VC previously held a national webinar on the New Economic Policy attended by President Ramnath Kovind and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday. Ram Pal Singh was made the VC of MDS University, Ajmer in October 2018 by Rajasthan’s previous BJP government. His appointment came through a couple of hours before the Vidhan Sabha election dates for polls were announced by the Election Commission of India in Rajasthan. Even as the VC of JNV University in Jodhpur, another government university, he was appointed by the previous Governor of Rajasthan, Kalyan Singh.
This related news sheds a lot of light in cancerous rot spread throughout the academia prevailing via government universities. Rajasthan’s academic circles are shaken with this corruption scandal, making everyone question the authenticity and honour of the state’s academia.
Anti Corruption Bureau: Ram Pal Singh’s troubled tenure
The arrest did not come out of a calm administration. Ram Pal Singh and Gulab Singh Chauhan, the new vice-chancellor of Jai Narain Vyas University in Jodhpur, were appointed a few hours before the Election Commission announced poll dates in October 2018, Careers360 reported at the time. Both posts had been vacant for months, and the search committee had sent its shortlist to the government weeks earlier.
Within days of taking charge he was restrained from functioning. On 11 October 2018, a High Court bench headed by then Chief Justice Pradeep Nandrajog, hearing a public interest petition by Laxminarayan Bairwa, issued notice to the new MDS University VC and stopped him from working, and Rajasthan Patrika’s court reporting records the restriction being extended at hearing after hearing into August 2019.
A dean committee appointed through Raj Bhawan ran day-to-day business with limited powers: it passed an interim budget and kept examinations moving, the paper reported, but nine months on, meetings of the management board and academic council, the ninth convocation and the research entrance test were all stalled. The matter had also reached the state assembly: after a question was raised there, the government wrote to the university asking how it was functioning without a vice-chancellor and under which provisions of its Act. By September 2020 he was functioning as vice-chancellor again, and had hosted a national webinar in the same week the bureau’s officers reached his door.
An administration already under watch
The bureau knew its way around the campus before this case. In October 2018 the ACB had caught Satish Agarwal, then head of the university’s management department, taking a bribe of Rs 50,000 from a research scholar; the Governor and Chancellor, Kalyan Singh, suspended him after an inquiry, and the bureau was still asking the university for his salary records a year later, Rajasthan Patrika reported.
That inquiry ran into the same problem as everything else at the university in 2019. The paper reported that the university had not been able to set up its own internal inquiry into the case, and named the restriction on the vice-chancellor’s work as the biggest obstacle, since such a committee needed the approval of the vice-chancellor or Raj Bhawan.
Set against that record, the trap of September 2020 is the point where two long-running stories, a contested vice-chancellorship and a campus already under the bureau’s eye, met. What the courts make of the case against the MDS University VC is still to be decided.
