Sickening Truth: Dr Fake playing with human lives

MEDICAL DISASTERS: These men are employed as docs in various hospitals, operating on fake degrees.

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New Delhi: They are supposed to be the pillars of any civil society. You trust them with your life during emergencies and they are vowed under an oath of saving human lives at any cost.

But what if the friendly doctor treating you or your loved ones is a fraud? What if he has multiple cases of fraud registered against him and is operating on a fake degree?

Sounds scary? Well, that’s the reality in a number of hospitals across India. CNN-IBN's Special Investigation Team decided to expose the dirty side of doctors.

Using the Government's Right to Information tool, the team found out just how many people are currently working as doctors in many top hospitals of the country when the Medical Council of India (MCI) isn’t even recognizing their MBBS degrees.

The MCI has records of all registered doctors in India. The CNN-IBN SIT filed an RTI application to find out how many doctors with fraudulent foreign degrees had the body detected in the last 15 years.

The team got a list of 53 doctors and tracked down some of them. Here’s an excerpt from the conversation with one of them:

CNN-IBN: Good name, sir?

Doctor: O mera naam to bada kharab sa hai, yaar. (Oh, I don’t have a good name)

CNN-IBN: Shubh naam sir? (Your good name sir)

Doctor: Shubh naam nahi mera naam hi naam hai (I have a famous name.)

CNN-IBN: Kya hai sir? (What is it, sir?)

Doctor: Captain Gautam.

But Captain Gautam is actually Dr Pravesh Raj. MCI records say he got a fake MD degree from the Sechenov Medical Academy, Moscow in 2000.

The MCI even filed a police complaint against him in Delhi in 2004.

The SIT filed a Right To Information query with the Delhi police asking how many cases did they register based on complaints filed by the MCI. The application also sought information on if some of these fake doctors prosecuted.

The Delhi police provided a list of 93 doctors with fake medical degrees, with cases registered against them.

But no case was registered against Pravesh Raj, who continues to treat unsuspecting patients at the Railway Hospital in Haryana's Yamunanagar.

The team found that records of the Medical Council of India on doctors with fake degrees and the cases registered by the Delhi police just do not match.

Raj is not the only defaulter. The team also uncovered another blatant fraud. Meet Dr Ankur Jain.

“I did my MD degree from Kasturba Medical College in Mangalore,” he says.

Not true, say MCI records.