Amritsar’s Forgotten Covid Testing Scam at the Peak of the Pandemic

A 2020 Testing Lab htat Masqueraded as the “Height of Positivity”

A Case That Never Vanished as Quietly as Covid-19

In June 2020, at the height of the first Covid wave, a disturbing case emerged from Amritsar involving Tuli Diagnostic Centre and EMC Super Speciality Hospital. According to the Punjab Vigilance Bureau, what began as a complaint by the family of a young pregnant doctor exposed a much wider pattern: people who appeared healthy, or later tested negative at government facilities, were being declared Covid-positive by a private lab and then pushed into paid hospitalisation and treatment. [1]

How the case began

The trigger was the case of Dr Anum Khullar, nine months pregnant, who tested positive for Covid-19 at Tuli Diagnostic Centre, opposite Guru Nanak Dev Hospital. When retested at the government hospital, her report came back negative. This discrepancy, coupled with similar complaints, led her father to approach the authorities, alleging that the private lab and a linked private hospital were issuing wrong Covid-positive reports. [2]

The Vigilance Bureau’s preliminary probe reportedly found multiple such “wrong” positives. It was alleged that the purpose was simple and sordid: to show people as Covid-positive, admit or isolate them with genuine positives, and extract money in the name of Covid care. In the middle of a public-health emergency, the charge was that some were willing to play with human life to make a quick buck. [3]

Many people also feared an even graver consequence: that persons who were not actually infected, but were allegedly given wrong Covid-positive certificates, may have contracted the infection after being sent to quarantine centres or Covid-care facilities, whether private or public, where they came into contact with genuinely infected patients. If such a consequence were ever established on evidence, the matter would travel far beyond ordinary cheating, misappropriation, breach of trust, or profiteering. It would raise a far more serious question: whether reckless or deliberate false certification during a pandemic exposed innocent persons to a life-threatening infection, with consequences that could attract the gravest forms of criminal liability under law.

The serious charges and initial action

The initial FIR was registered by the Punjab Vigilance Bureau at its Amritsar police station. It did not treat the matter as a minor irregularity. The doctors associated with Tuli Diagnostic Centre and EMC Hospital were booked under a battery of serious IPC sections, including 307, attempt to murder; 336, endangering life; 270, malignant act likely to spread infection; 420, cheating; and forgery-related sections, alongside provisions of the Prevention of Corruption Act. [1]

Those named included lab and hospital owners and doctors: among them Dr Robin Tuli, Dr Ridham/Ridhum Tuli, Dr Sanjay Piplani, Dr Mohinder Singh, linked to Tuli lab, and Dr Pawan Arora and Dr Pankaj Soni, linked to EMC Hospital, according to contemporary reports. The Vigilance Bureau indicated that it was also probing the possible role of government health officials in facilitating or overlooking the racket. [4]

Transfer from Vigilance to Amritsar Police

Then came a twist that raised eyebrows in legal and political circles. In early July 2020, the Punjab government decided that the investigation would no longer remain with the state Vigilance Bureau and ordered that it be handed over to the Amritsar police Commissionerate. A senior Vigilance officer confirmed that the probe into fake Covid-19 reports by the private lab and hospital had been transferred to the local police. [5]

This move did not pass without comment. Activists and even a sitting Congress MP from Amritsar, Gurjeet Singh Aujla, publicly questioned the decision to take the case away from Vigilance, a specialised anti-corruption agency, and give it to the city police, warning that this could dilute the investigation. The state’s Home Department processed the transfer, while the local police leadership initially stated that they had yet to receive the formal papers. [6]

The role of EMC Hospital

If Tuli Diagnostic Centre was the “testing arm” of the alleged racket, EMC Hospital was its purported hospital gateway. Contemporary reports and the Vigilance FIR place EMC’s owner‑director and other doctors alongside Tuli’s management as accused, on the allegation that they used the lab’s questionable Covid‑positive reports to pull largely unsuspecting people into unnecessary admission or isolation, and then bill them for Covid‑related care. In political statements at the time, EMC’s management is repeatedly named as a direct beneficiary of the fake‑report system, not a peripheral or innocent recipient of lab results, which is why the hospital figures allegedly as centrally in the case narrative as the lab itself.

Bail battles, ED probe — but no clear closure

After the transfer, the case continued, at least on paper. A local Amritsar court rejected the regular bail applications of three Tuli lab doctors, including Robin Tuli and colleagues, while two other accused, including doctors linked to EMC, withdrew their bail pleas. Around the same time, the Punjab and Haryana High Court granted interim protection, a stay on arrest, to two of the accused doctors in anticipatory bail proceedings and called for the medical board’s report and the original handwritten positive reports to scrutinise the evidence. [7]

The Enforcement Directorate also stepped in, treating the FIR as a predicate offence for money-laundering. It sought FIR copies and records to examine whether earnings from allegedly fake Covid reports and unnecessary treatment could amount to proceeds of crime under the PMLA. [4]

Legal reportage noted that an Amritsar court again rejected bail applications of three doctors accused in the same fake Covid report scam, while the police described the accused as absconding and said raids were being conducted to trace them. Even at this stage, there was no public indication of a concluded trial, conviction, acquittal, or quashing of the FIR. [8]

In other words, the public record shows: a powerful set of charges; a shift of investigation from Vigilance to Amritsar police; interim relief from higher courts for some accused; and a money-laundering probe by ED. What it does not show is a clear, transparent end-point to the case. [3]

The unanswered questions

This brings us to the larger issue, which goes beyond one lab or one hospital in Amritsar. During Covid, citizens were told, rightly, that extraordinary sacrifices were required in the name of public health. Yet here is a case where it is alleged that private actors exploited panic to mint money, and where even the investigating trajectory — from Vigilance to local police — raised concerns of influence and soft-pedalling. [5]

The public is entitled to know, six years on:

• What is the precise status of the FIR today?

• Have charge-sheets been filed, and against whom?

• Have any government doctors or health officials been named in the final investigation, or quietly dropped?

• Has any departmental or criminal responsibility been fixed on those within the system who may have colluded or looked the other way?

• Most crucially, has anyone actually been convicted, or has the matter been allowed to drift until memories fade?

A democratic state owes its citizens more than silence. Why does the public not routinely demand these answers once the initial headlines die down? Why does the state government not proactively place in the public domain the current status of such sensitive investigations, especially those involving alleged profiteering during a pandemic? Those who played with the lives of people during Covid to make a quick buck must be brought to book. And the final, uncomfortable question that still hangs in the air is this: were there high officials or political patrons who protected the accused, and is that why, even today, we are still asking what became of this case at all?

Citations

[1] TOI: Five doctors, lab owner booked over wrong Covid test
[2] HT: Private lab owners booked for alleged fake Covid reports
[3] Tribune: Vigilance Bureau busts alleged test-report racket
[4] HT: ED begins probe into Amritsar fake Covid reports case
[5] HT: Probe shifted from Vigilance to Amritsar police
[6] Indian Express: MP Aujla questions transfer of probe
[7] Tribune: Court rejects bail pleas of three doctors
[8] SooLegal: Amritsar court rejects bail in fake Covid report scam

Disclaimer

From all publicly available accounts reviewed for this article, no person or institution named in connection with the matter appears to have been convicted so far. Every person is presumed innocent in the eyes of law unless and until proven guilty by a competent court. Nothing in this article should be read as a finding of guilt, nor as an allegation of wrongdoing on the part of this publication, or the author.