The sole BJP government in peninsular India, which when it swept to power 28 months ago with a thin majority in the legislative assembly election of 2008 was expected to establish a beach-head for India’s largest opposition party in Parliament, is reeling under a series of scandals. Hard on the heels of a Rs.60,000 crore illegal mining scam involving two senior cabinet members of the govern-ment led by chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa and a Rs.450 crore Karnataka Industrial Area Development Board scandal in which government-owned land near Bangalore’s spanking new airport has been sold back to the government, the state’s medical education minister Ramchandra Gowda was forced to resign on September 12, following allegations of corruption in the recruitment and appointment of non-teaching staff in the government-owned Hassan Institute of Medical Sciences and Mysore Medical College.
The minister was found guilty following an enquiry conducted by I.M. Vittala Murthy, secretary of health and family welfare in Karnataka, who confirmed wide scale flouting of norms in the recruitment process. Following Vittala Murthy’s damning report, chief minister Yeddyurappa was compelled to issue a government order dated August 26 cancelling the appointment of the recruited non-medical staff including chemists, lab technicians and nursing assistants, and order a fresh recruitment process. The chief minister’s order in turn prompted the newly recruited staff to file a spate of petitions in the Karnataka high court challenging cancellation of their appointments.
Ramachandra Gowda denies any wrong-doing despite having resigned from office. “I need not have quit as I am still to be proven guilty. I only wanted to ensure that I am not a source of embarassment to my party and my leader. I maintain that there are no irregularities in the appointments. I have submitted an affidavit before the Karnataka high court and stand by it,” Gowda told reporters in Bangalore on September 13.
Although the minister maintains his innocence, Vittala Murthy’s report submitted in the high court is unequivocal in its indictment of the former minister. It lists insufficient advertising of available positions in newspapers; violation of several provisions of the Karnataka civil services bye-laws; issuing interview call letters in the ratio of 1:10 instead of the mandated 1:3; awarding grace marks to ineligible candidates; failure to publish a provisional selection list and violation of roster and caste reservation policy norms. Moreover the report indicts the minister for not seeking written permission of the finance ministry, which had ordered a general ban on new government appointments last year, and going ahead with the recruitment process.
Though neither the report nor the new recruits are publicly uttering the ‘B’ (‘bribe’) word, it’s an open secret that the recruited staff were obliged to purchase their jobs in the two already over-staffed medical colleges. According to an FIR filed in the Hassan town police station on September 3 by S.S. Prabhakar, huge pay-offs were made for jobs in the Hassan Institute of Medical Sciences. The FIR names six persons including Gowda’s personal assistant Virupaksha, and alleges that Rs.1.25 lakh was paid for each technician’s job, Rs.1.5 lakh to be appointed chemist, Rs.1.2 lakh for a D group employee’s post and Rs.1.5 lakh for a record keeper’s job.
Neither the media nor academics in this southern state are surprised by the charges brought against Gowda. “Corruption in the recruitment of staff — teaching and non-teaching — in government medical colleges is nothing new. It’s been happening routinely for the past few years with active political connivance. This has resulted in the steady deterioration of teaching-learn-ing standards in government medical colleges, and has adversely impacted the quality of medical practitioners in the state. Ideally all appointments must be made by the colleges themselves through selection committees compri-sing internal as well as external experts with full transparency. But it’s very unlikely that the government will surrender its power to make appoint-ments directly or through hand-picked nominees. The only way out of this quagmire is strong public opinion in favour of institutional autonomy and greater accountability,” says Dr. S. Kumar, principal and dean of the highly-respected privately-promoted M.S. Ramaiah Medical College, Bangalore.
Meanwhile the Karnataka high court has ordered the state government to set up another inquiry committee headed by additional chief secretary Abhijit Das Gupta to probe the recruitment scam. And even as a cloud of serious charges hovers over Ramchandra Gowda, chief minister Yeddyurappa has rehabilitated him by appointing him deputy chairman of the state planning commission.
Draw your own conclusions.
Summiya Yasmeen (Bangalore)