Private agency in dock for fake Kumbh tests | Economic Times

A private agency, which was awarded the contract for Covid testing in key areas of the Kumbh mela in Haridwar and is now under scanner for conducting 1 lakh fake tests, had submitted dubious office addresses to the Uttarakhand health department and listed phone numbers that are not in service, a TOI investigation has found.In one of the documents submitted by the agency, a copy of which is with TOI, the firm’s address is listed as being in Ansal Chambers, Bhikaji Cama Place, East Delhi. There is no Bhikaji Cama Place in East Delhi. On the company’s website, their corporate address is mentioned in a building in Sector 63, Noida, which TOI found was a tin shed. None of the phone numbers listed on the website was in service.TOI spoke to one of the directors of the company who said the incorrect addresses were “manual errors” and phone numbers were unreachable since they had been submitted on “old letterheads of the firm”. She also said the property in Noida — where a tin shed currently stands — was once a factory. “We shut shop two years ago. But the website still has that address,” she said.83593926When pressed further, she said they were now operational from Ansal Chambers, South Delhi, but had given their registered office on lease to a courier company during lockdown. “We will cooperate with the state’s investigation. The samples were collected and data was generated by two private labs that we had an MoU with, we were simply mediators,” she said.On Wednesday, TOI also found that the company’s proposal of interest to conduct testing during Kumbh was initially rejected by the Haridwar health department. Chief medical officer (CMO), Haridwar, Dr S K Jha, said the agency had approached them to get empanelled as a Covid-testing agency. “They were not given permission as they did not have approval from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR),” he said.The firm managed to get an approval from the mela administration to conduct Covid tests. The mela administration was created during Kumbh to take all decisions pertaining to the festival. Mela health officer Dr Arjun Singh Sengar said the agency was given the green light as it had an MoU with two private labs, both of which were ICMR-approved laboratories. But an official who is part of the Uttarakhand health department investigation said, “How can a company get the contract based on a simple ‘expression of interest’? Was there a tender to award the contracts? Who vetted the company? They had no track record of working with the state government.”Nine private agencies and the state government had conducted 4 lakh tests during the festival period in Haridwar after the Uttarakhand high court had directed the state to conduct 50,000 daily tests in Kumbh. The agency under scanner had been tasked with conducting tests in key mela areas. A total of 2.7 lakh antigen tests and 44,278 RT PCR tests were conducted in the mela area, of which one lakh have now turned out to be fake.The agency was paid Rs 350 per antigen test. According to the mela health department, bills of 4,000 tests conducted by the firm have been cleared so far.