The Madurai bench of the Madras High Court on Wednesday granted bail to two medical students, while dismissing similar petitions from their fathers in connection with the NEET impersonation scam. The court pointed that the parents who allegedly pressured children to join medical courses through malpractices are the first accused in the case and not the students.
The first student to get bail is from Chennai and had scored 130 in his NEET exam. The second student meanwhile had scored 120 and had written his exam in Lucknow. Police suspect that alternate persons were used to write the exam in both cases. The accused student and father however pushed for bail in the Madras High Court, following which the court granted bail to the wards alone.
On October 17, the Madurai bench of the Madras High Court had granted conditional bail to the first student to have been arrested in connection with the NEET impersonation case. The same judge, Justice GR Swaminathan, ruled on his bail petition. Then too, he had pointed out that in the student's case, it was his father Venkatesan who was the 'villain' and who misled his son. Considering the age and future of the student, he agreed to grant him bail. However he was directed to appear before the Madurai Deputy Superintendent of Police every morning at 10.30 am to sign a register.
The court has ordered the thumb impressions from the medical colleges to be matched with those submitted to the National Testing Agency (NTA). The CB-CID arrested Venkatesan and his son (a medical student) from Tirupati on September 26 after they went missing from their house in Chennai. The student had allegedly secured an MBBS seat in Theni Medical College after someone else wrote and cleared NEET exam for him in Mumbai. The scam came out in the open after the dean of the college carried out an internal probe reverifying the documents of the first-year students based on an e-mail tip-off he received regarding the scam.
The Madras High Court meanwhile ordered that thumbprints of all students admitted to medical colleges in Tamil Nadu be submitted to the Crime Branch-Crime Investigation Department (CBCID). This is in light of the impersonation scam unearthed in September this year where medical aspirants were found using proxies to write and pass the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET). A Bench of justices N Kirubakaran and P Velmurugan, also impleaded the Income Tax Department in the investigation, since raids in coaching centres in Bengaluru and Namakkal district, Tamil Nadu had seized 'huge cash' amounts.