Shocking Scandal At AIIMS Bhopal: How A Life-Saving Cancer Drug Became A Gateway To Public Loot!

In a country where people die every day due to the lack of affordable healthcare, the betrayal by a premier public health institution like AIIMS Bhopal cuts deeper than a scalpel. It isn’t just a financial irregularity. It isn’t just about medicine being overpriced. It is about what happens when institutions meant to heal start feasting on the very illness they claim to treat. The recent revelations from AIIMS Bhopal are not just disturbing; they are damning.

Here we are, talking abmout a life-saving chemotherapy drug, Gemcitabine, used in treating pancreatic, bladder, and breast cancers. At AIIMS Delhi, this injection costs just Rs 285. In AIIMS Raipur, it is bought for Rs 425. But at AIIMS Bhopal, this same vial was procured for a staggering Rs 2,100. No, this is not a typographical error. This is systemic, institutionalised financial abuse of public money.

While the citizens of Bhopal trusted their premier hospital to be a temple of healing, what they received instead was an altar of corruption. And the faces behind this shameful price inflation are not faceless middlemen or rogue vendors; they are individuals sitting at the top, officials, directors, and procurement heads, entrusted with saving lives, not selling out patients.

Scam at AIIMS Bhopal

What makes this episode more scandalous is the context. AIIMS Bhopal has not floated a single proper tender for medicine procurement in years. This deliberate bypass of public procurement protocol hints at more than negligence. It screams of collusion. All medicines, including Gemcitabine, were allegedly purchased through a single vendor: AMRIT Pharmacy, under the guise of an emergency procurement model long after COVID-19 receded into memory.

This isn’t just unethical. It is illegal.

The rules for government procurement under General Financial Rules (GFR) 2017 require open tenders, transparency, and competitive pricing, especially when the stakes are human lives. Yet at AIIMS Bhopal, it appears there was a backdoor that never closed. The same door was used again and again, with zero transparency, to flood the hospital with overpriced drugs. The AMRIT Pharmacy, rather than acting as a welfare point for affordable medicine, became a convenient channel through which AIIMS Bhopal officials seemed to funnel inflated contracts.

Let that sink in: a chemotherapy drug that costs Rs 285 in the nation’s capital was bought at 7 times the price in Bhopal. Multiply that cost across the hundreds, maybe thousands, of vials used each year, and the scam is easily worth crores. Crores looted under the very noses of those who came to this institution seeking hope. People mortgaging homes, borrowing money, walking miles to get their loved ones treated, while someone in the back office made a killing out of every vial injected.

When MP Alok Sharma raised this matter before the AIIMS Standing Finance Committee, it wasn’t just a political move. It was an act of moral courage. He laid bare what many within the system had likely known and buried: AIIMS Bhopal has been grossly mismanaged, and possibly corrupted, at the highest levels.

The central Health Ministry had no choice but to send an investigative team from Delhi. They did not come for a routine audit. They came to grill AIIMS Bhopal Director Dr. Ajay Singh and his top officials, for hours, over every decision, every invoice, every transaction. That this inquiry happened at all is a sign that what has gone on in Bhopal is not business as usual. It’s the rot at the heart of an institution.

Even as patients cried in waiting halls and beds overflowed with suffering, AIIMS Bhopal maintained a procurement model that benefited only those in power. The government initially allowed direct purchases from AMRIT Pharmacy during the pandemic, an understandable deviation in times of global crisis. But to continue using this loophole years later, when other AIIMS branches have returned to tender-based procurement, is nothing short of a crime.

Documents and insider reports reveal that AIIMS Bhopal continued this direct procurement without inviting a single tender for years. No competition. No price verification. No checks and balances. Just quiet, opaque, and consistent money flow from public coffers into private hands.

The health ministry’s silence over the years only adds fuel to this fire. What were the audits doing? How did such massive overpricing go unnoticed until a Member of Parliament decided to raise the alarm? And how many more such institutions are out there, doing the same thing, just waiting to be caught?

Let us not underestimate the human cost of this scam. Cancer is not a disease you can afford to take lightly. For every inflated Gemcitabine vial, someone’s treatment was delayed. For every Rs 2,100 spent on what should have cost Rs 285, another patient might have gone untreated because the budget was exhausted. Corruption in cancer treatment is not just immoral; it is murderous.

Dr. Ajay Singh, the Director of AIIMS Bhopal, has yet to provide a satisfactory explanation. His silence is as loud as his mismanagement. The Health Ministry’s grilling session reportedly yielded nothing but vague justifications and deflections. But the documents speak. The numbers don’t lie. And the patients who suffered? They deserve answers, not apologies.

Even more disturbing is the suggestion that this isn’t an isolated issue. If one drug is being overpriced to such a degree, it’s likely that dozens more have followed the same route. This is not merely bad governance. This is exploitation. It reeks of a nexus between hospital administrators, private vendors, and pharmacy owners. A nexus that has gone unchecked for years.

The media, civil society, and judicial institutions must not treat this as a minor procurement error. AIIMS Bhopal is not a local dispensary. It is a premier institution, built with public funds, meant to serve as a beacon of excellence. If such brazen theft can happen there, what hope is left for India’s rural health centers and community clinics?

It is time for criminal investigations. This is embezzlement masquerading as administration. And the perpetrators, no matter how senior, must be brought to justice. Let the inquiry go beyond mere reports and reach the heart of the matter. Let every receipt be audited. Let every procurement file be opened. Let every call and every email between AIIMS officials and AMRIT Pharmacy be tracked. The truth will emerge. And when it does, it should not be buried under bureaucratic formalities.

Because this is not just about inflated drug prices. This is about whether the Indian citizen can still believe that public hospitals are sacred spaces of care, not crime scenes of collusion. This is about whether the Indian state has the will to protect its weakest, or whether it will continue to shield its most corrupt.

If we do not demand justice now, the next vial of overpriced medicine might be injected into someone you know, someone you love. And you will be left wondering if the system failed them, or if we allowed it to.

There must be no more hiding behind files. No more blaming the vendor. No more blaming the pandemic. The time for accountability is now. AIIMS Bhopal must answer not just to the Health Ministry or Parliament, but to the people of India.

Because public trust, once lost, is hard to win back. And in this case, that loss could prove fatal.