INDORE — A routine anti-corruption sting has cracked open a massive administrative healthcare scam in Madhya Pradesh, revealing that a government medical officer was officially appointed and drawing employment benefits across three separate geographic districts at the same time. The structural fraud came to light following a targeted raid by the Indore Lokayukta police team, who caught the medical professional red-handed while extracting a financial bribe from a local complainant.
The accused practitioner, identified as Medical Officer Dr Mahesh Chandra Sharma, was intercepted by a special Lokayukta trap team at the Jaisinghnagar bus stand while accepting a bribe of ₹5,000. Subsequent tracking of his establishment footprint revealed that he held active, concurrent postings at primary health facilities across Shahdol, Sheopur, and Khargone districts—locations separated by hundreds of kilometres.
The Lokayukta Trap and Service Record Revelations
According to official anti-corruption police files, Dr Sharma had demanded a total illicit bribe of ₹10,000 from a complainant in exchange for cancelling an official employee attachment order and stopping a mandatory relocation dispatch. The victim approached the Special Police Establishment (SPE) Lokayukta office in Indore to lodge a formal complaint, prompting detectives to layout a currency trap for the first installment of ₹5,000.
Following his immediate arrest under the Prevention of Corruption Act, the health department initiated a routine review of his service history. Investigative auditors were shocked to discover that while Dr Sharma was actively physically operating in one region, his official credentials, biometric profiles, and service books were concurrently registered across two other far-flung public health networks.
Defying Physics: The 1,400-Kilometre Phantom Roster
The geographic realities of the doctor’s multiple appointments have exposed profound systemic vulnerabilities within the Madhya Pradesh health department’s internal portals. According to data verified by regional health coordinators, the three districts where the doctor held simultaneous tenure include:
Shahdol District: Posted actively at the Primary Health Centre (PHC) in Oofri since February 2024.
Sheopur District: Registered as a full-time medical officer at PHC Sahsaram since 2021.
Khargone District: Formally documented on institutional rosters within the Segaon block since February 2023.
Geographically, Shahdol sits roughly 650 kilometres away from Sheopur, while Khargone is located nearly 750 to 800 kilometres in the opposite direction. Maintaining genuine daily attendance or providing authentic emergency patient care across these distances simultaneously is physically impossible, proving the existence of a coordinated paperwork fraud scheme.
Departmental Backlash and Salaries Withheld
The disclosure has triggered an immediate multi-district administrative scramble, with top health directors issuing emergency show-cause notices. Chief Medical and Health Officer (CMHO) of Khargone, Dr Daulat Singh Chauhan, formally confirmed that local databases validated Dr Sharma’s phantom presence on their payrolls for over three years, noting that a comprehensive evidence portfolio has been forwarded to the state secretariat for termination proceedings.
Concurrently, Sheopur CMHO Dr Dileep Singh Sikarwar announced that a four-member specialized inquiry committee has been convened to investigate how localized verification systems failed to flag the duplicated identification data. Following the bribery arrest, Dr Sharma completely non-cooperated with departmental queries, disabled his communication devices, and absconded from active view. In response, state financial officers have issued urgent orders to indefinitely freeze his salary accounts across all three jurisdictions as criminal and departmental trials proceed.
