Jalandhar-based Bharat Mahajan claims to provide up and coming hospitals with full faculty for inspection.
On Sunday, NDTV aired a report on how medical colleges in Punjab illegally
rent 'ghost' faculty - private practitioners hired for two-three days - to get their license from the Medical Council of India (MCI).
In the second part of our investigation, we discovered a web of dubious 'fixers' and so-called placement agencies, which supply doctors of all specialties wholesale to colleges, and even claim they can manage the MCI, the main authority meant to vet medical colleges and issue a license.
Allegations of corruption in the MCI peaked in 2010 when its then President, Ketan Desai, was charged on multiple counts. It was alleged that he received Rs 2 crore in bribe from a Punjab-based medical college to clear its application.
The MCI says it has cleaned up its act since then. Its current President, Jayshree Shah, says they now conduct surprise checks on colleges and have also introduced biometric attendance record for doctors.
But NDTV's investigation suggests otherwise.
Several doctors we met in Punjab shared with us phone numbers of companies openly looking for 'ghost' doctors.
We asked the head of the Punjab Medical Council, Dr GS Grewal, to speak to one such company based in Madhya Pradesh. He pretended to be a doctor who ran his own clinic, eager to use their services.
The lady who answered the phone told him: "For three 3 days, you have to stay (at the college) for inspection, and for three days you will have to close your clinic."
She said there was a demand for doctors in medical colleges in Uttar Pradesh's Farrukhabad, Lucknow and Moradabad towns.
She even calmly described the 'rate card': Rs 30,000 per visit for an assistant professor, Rs 4-5 lakhs for an associate professor.
Dr Grewal then located the number of another a Jalandhar-based man - Bharat Mahajan - who claims to provide up and coming hospitals with full faculty for inspection.
Dr Grewal called him, pretending to be a Dr Sabharwal who wanted to start a college in the Punjab town of Moga.
Mahajan, who claims to specialise in this work for many colleges in Punjab, confidently promised Dr Grewal a full roster of 'ghost' doctors: surgeons, anesthetists, gynecologists and so on.
We travelled to Jalandhar to meet him, posing as Dr Grewal's accountants, to see if these claims were genuine.
A heavy set man wearing an expensive watch, he met us outside a McDonalds restaurant, and insisted we speak inside his Mercedes car.
We told him we ran a 500-bed hospital in Moga, but that our application for a medical college was stuck in the MCI.
He claimed he can speed up our request for colleges - not just in Punjab, but across the country.
"I can manage anywhere in India...in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh. Even a college in Andaman and Maldives."
"The file process is slow because you don't have an expert person," he said. Shockingly, he also claimed that the MCI is still under the influence of tainted former chief Ketan Desai.
"We have experienced people with us. Even retired deputy directors of the MCI are with us. They only used to do such things, who were with Ketan Desai saheb. We have such people with us", said Mahajan.
These insiders, he claimed, will tip off our college before the inspection. "Even if the MCI is coming to your college tomorrow, come to us, we can manage."
"But cash is required everywhere", he added.
Members of the Punjab Medical Council, who have brought the menace of 'ghost' doctors to light, say they are not surprised. They say the number of 'ghost' faculty they have unearthed suggests that the MCI, for all its efforts to clean up, is compromised.