STF arrests 3 for selling drugs for hospital in open market

Lucknow, Nov 25

The Uttar Pradesh Special Task Force (STF) have arrested three people for selling drugs in the open market that were meant for sale to patients at King George's Medical University (KGMU) only.

The drugs were recovered from the trio, one of whom was deployed at a medical store on the KGMU campus.

The STF recovered several boxes of tablets, syrups and injectable medicines, all obtained from KGMU's Hospital Revolving Fund (HRF) pharmacy store, worth over Rs 2 lakh.

The HRF stores provide medicines at up to 50-60 per cent discount to patients coming to the OPD or those admitted at the medical university hospital.

"The arrests were made near the Nimbu Park, which is about 100 metres from the KGMU convention centre. One of the arrested Rajneesh Kumar is working as a pharmacist salesman at HRF pharmacy since past three years and is resident of Triveni Nagar. The other two, Nitin Vajpayee and Priyanshu Mishra, are also residents of Lucknow," said a statement from STF.

The arrested men revealed how they obtained medicines and sold them at a higher price.

The HRF pharmacy provides medicine against unique health identification (UHID) number. The accused used the UHIDs that they used to note down while selling medicines to genuine patients and utilized the same UHIDs to issue more medicines at the maximum discount rate.

The medicines had aKGMU HRF' printed on each strip or bottle, which was removed by two other alleged accomplices Suraj Mishra and Sugreem Verma.

Verma allegedly coordinated the sale of these medicines to medicine stores at a discount of 20 per cent and the profit margin of about 30 per cent was distributed among Rajneesh and others.

"The arrested persons named a few more staff working at a different HRF pharmacy on the KGMU campus and operational in the department of plastic surgery, Trauma Centre, Gandhi Ward. They told police that this fraud was being done for the past over four years," said the statement.

Since UHID was used to issue the medicines, the record of the stock was maintained and no one would primarily come to know about the cheating.

Police are now questioning the arrested men to get details of the medical stores in the city where these medicines were sold and if more people are involved in this fraud.