In 2015, Giridhar K. Sajeev secured a near perfect score in Class 12. The next year, he cracked the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET), the qualifying exam to pursue an MBBS degree. While his NEET score didn’t get him a government college seat, where the fee is less than ₹1 lakh a year, Giridhar did manage one in Glocal Medical, a privately-funded college established in 2015 in Mirzapur Pole village, Saharanpur district, Uttar Pradesh.
His mother, a retired head nurse, and his father, a clerk, both government employees from Kollam, Kerala, paid ₹25 lakh across the two and a half years he was there. “They took a loan and invested their retirement money. The fee was ₹10 lakh a year,” says Giridhar, of the university run by the Abdul Waheed Educational and Charitable Trust, which was set up in 2009.
In 2019, when Giridhar had settled into the U.P. village with a view of the Himalayas, and just about got used to an alien language, away from his hometown of coconut trees and backwaters, Glocal lost recognition to run its MBBS course. The university, offering many other courses, had allegedly admitted 90 undergraduate MBBS students despite the then medical education regulatory body, the Medical Council of India (MCI), issuing a warning not to do so. The institute was allegedly unable to meet the minimum infrastructure, student-teacher ratio, and patient requirement to run the course, details that came out during the hearing in the case in the Allahabad High Court, which the students lost.
