At about 3.30 on the afternoon of Monday, 12 October, a senior official of the National Dental Commission walked into the Administration Section on the fourth floor of the Commission’s headquarters in R.K. Puram in Delhi and found a stranger at a colleague’s desk.
The computer was labelled “RAM Admin”. It belongs to Ram Gahan Prajapati, an Assistant Secretary of the Commission. The man sitting at it was not an employee of the National Dental Commission. On the screen was a document laid out as a table. The official who confronted him says it was a price list.
The official began recording on his phone. Three clips, just under three minutes in all, have been reviewed by The Probe. They are the core of this report.
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What the Man Said on Camera
Asked who he was, the man said he had come from “Quick Trader”. Asked whether he had an official entry, he said no. He had come, he said, to help “Ram Gahan ji”, the officer whose desk he was using, “a little with the tender”.
Which tender? “This is data digitisation tender.” Had it been floated? “It is already floated.”
And what was he doing with it? “I’m analysing who has how much marks and what is high.”
In government procurement, that is the language of bid evaluation: the stage at which competing bidders are scored against technical criteria and the ranking that decides the contract takes shape. It is work reserved for the buying organisation’s own evaluation committee.
The senior official of the NDC asked who had told him to do this. “Secretary sir,” the man replied. Asked for the name: “Modak sir.”
Arindam Modak is the Secretary of the National Dental Commission, the officer appointed by the Central Government to head its Secretariat.
The man said he had come from Kolkata, that his own work was “going on here”, and that it was “in Policybazaar”, in “insurance and data digitisation”. He said the Secretary “told me you look after this also and help”.
The recording ends with the official turning to colleagues. “Who allowed him here?” he asks, his voice rising. “Who allowed this man in this office?”
Two Hours Inside
The Probe has established, from a second member of staff who was at the reception desk that afternoon, that the man had signed the visitor register between 1 pm and 1.40 pm. He entered his name as Abhijeet Singh and the purpose of his visit was mentioned as “official”.
By the time he was challenged, he had been in the building for about two hours.
The computers at the National Dental Commission are password-protected. A visitor cannot use one without an officer’s login. According to staff present, the man had a document open on screen and a set of documents on the desk.
The official who recorded the footage went to report what he had seen to the presidents of the Commission’s three statutory boards. By the time he returned, the man had left. Nobody had taken his details or detained him. The Probe has not been able to independently verify his identity or reach him.
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A Complaint, Then an Order
On 13 October, the day after the incident, a written complaint went by email to the Chairperson of the National Dental Commission and the presidents of its three boards, with the video clips attached. It asked that the matter be referred to the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, that the computer be forensically examined, and that CCTV footage, computer logs, the visitor register and the tender file be preserved. It sought an Action Taken Report within 15 days.
Two days later, on 15 October, the Commission issued Office Order M-2705, signed by Ritu, Under Secretary, “with the approval of the Competent Authority”. Its title: “Measures to Prevent Unauthorized Access to Official Records and Computer Systems and to Ensure Proper Maintenance and Security of Records”.
The order directs that “no outsider, visitor or unauthorized person shall be permitted to enter the workstation areas or access official records and computer systems without prior permission from the competent authority”, that any authorised visitor “shall be appropriately monitored or accompanied by the concerned official”, that employees “shall lock their computer screens” whenever leaving their desks, and that “passwords shall not be shared with unauthorized persons”. It was copied to the notice board and the guard file.
The order does not mention the events of 12 October. But when The Probe asked the Under Secretary on Monday whether it had been issued because of them, she was direct.
“That is why we took out that order,” Ritu said. “15th ko jo order nikala woh isi liye nikala, kyunki yeh bahut serious issue hai.” The order of the 15th was issued for this very reason, because this is a very serious issue.
Was an investigation under way? “Yes.”
Who was the Competent Authority whose approval the order cites? “Chairperson. Chairperson, NDC.”
Asked who the private individual was, she declined. “Main phone pe koi baat nahi karna chahti.” She asked for official questions by email and invited The Probe to the office.
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“If I Know That He Came, It Means I Called Him”
The Probe spoke to NDC Secretary Arindam Modak by telephone on Monday. He was on leave in Kolkata and said he would return on Sunday.
His first response was that the entry was “not unauthorised” and that the matter was “being misrepresented”. Asked about the video, in which the man says “Secretary sir, Modak sir” sent him, Modak said: “Yes. Yes. That is why I said. This is not unauthorised.”
Asked whether he had authorised the man to use the Assistant Secretary’s computer, he said: “System was not used. System was not used. System is a different issue altogether.”
Asked again whether the man was unauthorised, he said: “I know that he came. If I know that he came, then it means I called him.”
Minutes later he qualified that. “Dekhiye, main generally kisi ko bulata nahin. But I am aware of that, he will come.” I generally don’t call anyone, but I was aware he would come.
Was the man allowed to use a computer? “No. No. No. Not allowed to use a computer.” He added, in Hindi, that the man had suddenly done so, and that “how much he did, that is the question.”
Did he know the man? “Main jaanta tha.” I knew him. The name? “Abhishek ya Abhijeet. Donon mein se kuch hai.” One of the two.
Asked whether the man was lying about being sent by him, Modak said: “Yeh jhoot sach ka baat nahin hai.” This is not a matter of truth or lies.
He would not say what the man does or how he knows him. Nor, despite his remark that knowing the man had come “means I called him”, would he say whether he had in fact called him on 12 October. “These are too internal questions,” he said. He described the complaint as “fabricated in a malafide way” and said it had been raised by a member of staff whose “background has several issues”. He asked The Probe to wait for a face-to-face meeting after his leave. When we told him that the report would be published on Monday and that his responses would be used, he said: “Definitely.”
The Tender That Isn’t There
The man on the video said the data digitisation tender had “already been floated”. The Probe could not find it.
Tenders floated by central bodies such as the National Dental Commission are normally run as bids on the Government e-Marketplace, the portal on which the Commission’s account still carries its old name, Dental Council of India. A search of GeM’s open bids on Sunday showed none from the Commission. Its contracts on the portal since June include no digitisation work and none awarded through a bid. The Commission’s website has no tenders page, and nothing on digitisation appears among its public notices. Government financial rules require any purchase on GeM above a modest threshold to go through the portal’s bidding process. The Probe could find no record of a data digitisation tender in any of these places.
If a tender was floated, The Probe could not find where. If bids were being scored on 12 October, the question is whose bids, obtained how, and evaluated by whom.
Ram Gahan Prajapati, the Assistant Secretary whose computer was used, returned The Probe’s calls on Monday afternoon. When told he was speaking to a journalist and asked whether he had authorised the man to use his system, he ended the call.
The Chairperson of the National Dental Commission, Dr Sanjay Tewari, was reached by phone on Monday. He said he was attending to a family medical emergency and asked to speak later. The Probe has sent him questions by email. His response will be added to this report when it is received.
Why This Matters
For over 7 decades, dentistry in India was regulated by the Dental Council of India, a body of elected dentists set up under the Dentists Act of 1948. It decided which dental colleges could open, how many students they could admit, what they taught, and who could practise. Over the years it drew repeated allegations of opaque decision-making, and in 2023 Parliament passed the National Dental Commission Act to replace it.
The National Dental Commission came into being on 19 March 2026. Its members are appointed, not elected. Three autonomous boards work under it: one for undergraduate and postgraduate dental education, one for assessing and rating dental colleges, and one for ethics and the register of dentists. Its Secretary, appointed by the Central Government for a fixed four-year term, runs the Secretariat, its staff, its files and its purchasing.
The government presented the change as a move from an elected body accused of opacity to an appointed one built for transparency and accountability. The NDC is seven months old. It regulates every dental college and every registered dentist in the country, and it spends public money.
An outsider sitting at an Assistant Secretary’s desk, scoring bids by his own account in a “data digitisation tender” that appears in no public record, and saying on camera that the Secretary sent him, is a test of that promise. The Secretary, for his part, says he knew the man and knew he was coming. The Commission’s own order of 15 October treats the risk as real. Its Under Secretary says the matter is serious and under investigation.
What the Commission has not said is who the man is; how a private individual came to be sitting at an official computer in the Administration Section for the better part of an afternoon; what work he was doing there, and on which tender; whether the Secretary, who says he knew the man was coming, or the Assistant Secretary, whose password-protected computer he was using, had any part in it; who is conducting the investigation its Under Secretary says is under way; and what, if anything, it has found.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theprobe.in
