Conman who brought disgrace to Nalanda still at large

Almost a week after the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) busted a racket which helped more than 50 people from Bihar become probationary officers in different banks, the leader of the racket Sanjiv Verma, a peon, remains out of the police dragnet.

Posted at Bihar Education Resource Centre (BERC) in Nalanda, the peon led a ‘high-level’ gang, which included POs as impersonators who helped unemployed youth clear examinations for a fee. The rate was Rs 18 lakh for PO and Rs 10 lakh for a bank clerk.

But Sanjiv is not the first conman from Nalanda, who fleeced young aspirants.

It was Ranjit Singh, alias Ranjit Don, from Hilsa in Nalanda, who ran a well-oiled racket in leaking question papers and facilitating admissions into premier medical and engineering colleges by placing dummy candidates. Ranjit was arrested in 2003 for leaking the question papers for Common Admission Test (CAT).

His ‘clients’ included wards of top-notch officers ready to be part of his fraudulent scheme to clear competitive examinations. A decade back, the CBI arrested Ranjit from Delhi.
Last week, too, the CBI apprehended Sanjiv’s conduit from Noida and arrested his PO wife at Nalanda, but Sanjiv, who brought disgrace to his native place, remained untraced. But there is a flip side to the story: this is the same Nalanda from where farmers Sumant Kumar and Rakesh Kumar set world records in paddy and potato production respectively some time back.

Nalanda, which gave the country leaders like Nitish Kumar, has a glorious past. This was the place which gave the world its first university – Nalanda University. Established during the reign of Kumara Gupta-I (AD 414-445 ), Nalanda University was arguably the highest seat of Buddhist learning.

Spread over in nearly two square kilometres, it had about 1500 professors and 10,000 students. Legend has it that scholars such as Panini and Jivaka studied there. According to Chinese scholar Hieun Tsang, it was a six-storey building where the staff and students had a free boarding and lodging.