Lucknow: The Enforcement Directorate has registered a case of money laundering in connection with fake admissions in AYUSH colleges of UP.
The scam surfaced in November 2022 when the Union ministry of Ayush had flagged anomalies in the undergraduate admission process to state government and private ayurvedic, Unani and homeopathy colleges. The state government had then handed over the investigation to the Special Task Force which arrested 17 accused and filed a chargesheet against them. Now ED will conduct a probe. At least 12% admissions in Ayush colleges of the state for the academic session 2019 were found to be bogus.
An FIR in the scam was filed on November 5, 2022, at Hazratganj police station and thereafter the case was given to the STF.
The STF had completed its probe in February and filed a chargesheet in a Lucknow court against 17 accused including former director of Ayurveda directorate SN Singh; counselling in-charge Umakant Yadav; former senior assistant director, Ayurveda directorate, Rajesh Singh; former junior assistant in Ayurveda directorate Kailash Chandra Bhaskar; Uptron Powertronics Limited director Kuldeep Verma and AGM Prabodh Singh; directors of private companies Gaurav Gupta, Harshwardhan Tiwari, Saurabh Maurya, Indradev Mishra, Rupesh Ranjan Pandey, Vijay Yadav, and three managers of private firms.
In May 2022, the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad high court had directed the CBI to probe into allegations of anomalies in the admission process of undergraduate and postgraduate courses run by Ayush department in 2019. However, the order was challenged by one of the accused in the Supreme Court which stayed the CBI probe.
