Rs 20-25 lakh per candidate, forged FMGE scorecards uploaded to the Maharashtra Medical Council portal: three arrested, 22 foreign graduates booked

Indian students who finish an MBBS abroad cannot practise at home until they pass the Foreign Medical Graduate Examination (FMGE), run by the National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences in New Delhi. Only then does a state council such as the Maharashtra Medical Council (MMC) grant provisional registration, which is needed for an internship seat. For a graduate who has failed, that one scorecard is the difference between a career and a dead end, and that is the document a Nashik-based racket is accused of forging.

According to the Free Press Journal, reporting on 8 October 2026, Maharashtra Cyber police arrested three men: Rahul Gopal Patil, 35, of Nashik, and Varun Prataprao Akhade, 28, and Sanket Prabhakar Unhale, 26, both of Buldhana. All three were remanded in judicial custody until 19 October. The complaint came from Rakesh Waghmare, a manager at the MMC, after documents submitted during online registration appeared suspicious. Police allege that Patil collected Aadhaar and PAN cards, passports, school certificates, apostilled degrees and internship papers from graduates who had failed the FMGE, then supplied forged FMGE scorecards, provisional registration certificates and internship completion certificates, charging Rs 20 lakh to Rs 25 lakh per candidate. He allegedly kept a commission and paid the rest to two associates in Bhopal and Delhi whom police had not traced. The paper added that investigators were still trying to establish how the accused obtained access credentials for the MMC's online registration portal, and that 16 foreign medical graduates who failed the FMGE were under scanner.

Medical Dialogues, on 10 October, described how the fraud surfaced. On 7 August a council computer operator and a senior clerk noticed suspicious documents in the online profiles of some foreign graduates. Waghmare, described there as the council's Registrar, checked the profiles of candidates who had failed the FMGE and found fake papers in 22 of them, and the council's administrator, Dr Vinky Rughwani, directed him to the cyber police. Twenty-two graduates were booked, two were arrested and 19 named as wanted, and the council's later verification identified more than 30 such candidates.

The weakness, on the reports so far, was a registration process in which candidates uploaded their own scorecards and certificates to an online profile, and the forgeries were spotted by council staff reviewing those profiles rather than at the point of upload. How the racket got portal access remains the open question in the police investigation. The two outlets give different counts, 16 graduates under scanner in the Free Press Journal and 22 booked in Medical Dialogues, but in both accounts the graduates who received forged documents are treated as suspects rather than clients.

For a student abroad the lesson is blunt. No agent or 'contact' can turn a failed FMGE into a licence; the only route is to sit the exam again. Anyone offering registration for a fee is selling forgery, and the graduate whose profile carries the forged scorecard is the one who gets booked. Check the examining board's own result, and check any doctor's name on the state council's public register rather than trusting a printed certificate.