Last December, Dilshad Chaudhry travelled with about 100 of his fellow villagers by bus to a local Indian medical-school hospital. They’d been told that foreign doctors were coming to tour the facility, and check-ups would be free. There was nothing wrong with Chaudhry; he was accompanying his brother, who had a back problem. But “every person was told to lie in a bed even if they’re not sick,” he said.
The 20-year-old electrician said he never saw any foreign physicians that day, but the hospital’s Indian doctors kept checking that the phony patients were in bed. “They wanted to make sure no one escaped,” he said. That was the same month government inspectors visited the hospital, which is at Muzaffarnagar Medical College, 80 miles northeast of New Delhi. The inspectors checked, among other things, whether there were enough patients to provide students with adequate clinical…
