An MBBS and an FRCS that did not check out: the Sonarpur "doctor" arrested in September 2026 after police found discrepancies in every degree he claimed

West Bengal has had a run of fake-doctor cases over the past decade, and the one from Sonarpur, on Kolkata's southern edge, in September 2026 follows the pattern of the most ambitious of them: not a quack with a village clinic, but a man presenting the credentials of a specialist.

According to The Hans India and Social News XYZ, a man named in the reports as Bishwaroop Acharya was arrested on the night of 15 September 2026 after coming under police scrutiny, when officers found multiple discrepancies in the degrees he claimed. He was accused of using a fake MBBS degree and a fake FRCS, the fellowship of a British royal surgical college that in India signals a surgeon trained abroad. Police said they were investigating where the documents had come from.

The FRCS is the detail that makes this case worth recording. A forged MBBS gets a man into a clinic; a forged foreign fellowship gets him into an operating theatre and onto a hospital's letterhead as a consultant, because it is a qualification that Indian employers find hard to verify and rarely try to. The royal colleges in the United Kingdom maintain searchable registers of their fellows, and the state medical council's register shows whether an MBBS was ever registered; neither takes more than a few minutes to consult. The Sonarpur arrest came after police did what the hospitals and patients had not.

For students, the lesson is about the value of the real thing. A genuine foreign qualification is only worth what its issuer will confirm to a stranger who asks, and the same registers that expose a forgery protect a genuine graduate. If you earn a qualification abroad, make sure it appears in a register anyone can check, and expect to be checked.