📰 From the news · Impersonating a real college/agent
Two years as an ICU registrar on a letter the council called forged: the contract doctor at Mumbai's V N Desai Hospital and the agency that never checked
Mumbai's municipal hospitals are run by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), and from 2018 to 2024 their intensive care units were staffed through manpower contractors. The tender made the contractor responsible for supplying doctors registered with the Maharashtra Medical Council (MMC). At V N Desai Hospital in Santacruz, that clause was the only check, and for two years nobody applied it.
According to Medical Dialogues on 6 August 2025, a senior contract doctor placed by Sai Sanjeevani, a BMC-appointed agency, had worked as an ICU registrar at V N Desai from late 2022, which the Free Press Journal later dated to October 2022. Instead of an MMC registration certificate he had submitted a letter claiming he was permitted to practise. In February 2025 a hospital employee noticed the missing certificate; in April the MMC replied that he was not registered and that the letter was forged. Medical Dialogues reported that he was dismissed and fined, and that the hospital issued two show-cause notices to the agency for failing to verify his qualifications. Payments to the agency had been stopped since November 2024. The Free Press Journal reported the same day that the man had earlier worked as a resident doctor at a BMC ward hospital in 2021-22, earning over Rs 7 lakh, and as a house officer at Jogeshwari Trauma Hospital from April to June 2025, earning about Rs 2 lakh, even after being barred from V N Desai.
The case did not end there. Medical Dialogues reported on 22 March 2026 that the Maharashtra State Human Rights Commission had issued notices to the BMC commissioner and Mumbai Police on a complaint by activist Jay Lokhande, with a hearing on 1 April. On 22 June the Free Press Journal reported a fresh notice on a complaint by advocate Tushar Bhosale, who sought an FIR against the doctor, the contractor and the then medical superintendent, with a hearing on 9 July. A day later the BMC ordered every hospital dean and medical superintendent to re-verify the degrees and registrations of doctors, especially contract staff. Additional Municipal Commissioner Dr Vipin Sharma told the civic House that the man was an MBBS graduate from Russia without MMC registration, that verification was the contractor's duty under the tender, and that the contractor had been blacklisted in 2024. None of the reports mentions an FIR being registered.
The mechanism was a foreign degree with no Indian registration, hidden behind an intermediary. The agency vouched, the hospital trusted the agency, and nobody typed the name into the council's register until a staff member asked for the certificate.
For a foreign graduate the lesson is that a Russian MBBS gives no right to practise in India until the screening test is passed and the state council registration is issued; a letter is not a licence, and the BMC's former Health Committee chairperson has now asked that foreign graduates show NMC or other valid registration. For patients and hospital administrators, every doctor, including contract staff, should be checked on the state register at hiring, not after a complaint.
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This is a news-sourced case summary written by the TrustMBBS team, not a first-person account; see the sources above. They reflect one person's experience and are not a verdict on any institution. Report your own: Report a scam or tell your story.