At the beginning of the second wave of Covid in India when cases were doubling up everyday,  Uttarakhand held the Mahakumbh Mela in Haridwar which witnessed hundreds of devotees. The religious gathering put millions at risk of the infection as the devotees dipped in Ganga in large numbers and then travelled back, exposing others to the virus as well.

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Even after the entire nation condemned the move and pleaded with the government to shelve the kumbh mela this year, it didn’t budge. What happened next was the biggest Covid test scam which painted the religious gathering as completely benign to the global crisis.

The stats showed that the Covid positivity report at Kumbh was only 2.8% which is incredible (read BS) since it was 14% in other states which were in complete lockdown. We don’t know who was buying this till now, but it is finally being unmasked, thanks to an LIC agent Vipan Mittal from Faridkot.

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When he got a Covid report for the test he never took, he knew something was fishy. Fearing that his personal details have been wrongly used, he went to the authorities and even health department officials, before finally taking his case to the ICMR.   

He said, “My Covid-19 report said I was negative, but I hadn’t got tested. I went to local district authorities, but I was told to go away. Health department officials were also not interested in finding out what was going on. As a last resort, I filed an email complaint with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).”

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He also filed an RTI plea regarding the testing at Kumbh and now a probe is underway. The investigation reveals that lakhs of fake reports were made with fake personal details of people and Mittal was among them.

The experts had expressed their doubts about unbelievably low positivity rate despite allegedly large testing held at Kumbh which is now finally unraveling to be a massive scam to brush off the irresponsibility of the authorities.

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The agencies conducting tests during the Kumbh period are on close watch and the Haridwar district administration has been asked to present the action-taken report to hold everyone accountable for this scam.

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All it took was a humble SMS containing the negative results and the eagerness of Mittal to get to the bottom of the truth to expose a scam which probably took hundreds of lives. 

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