Meet undercover cop who cracked med ragging case

Indore: For over three months, the book-lugging girl with the quick smile was a fixture at the MGM Medical College canteen in Indore. Cheerful and sprightly, she made friends easily — from canteen boys to students hanging around over chai and chit-chat.
No one had a clue the friendly fresher was an undercover cop — 24-year-old Shalini Chouhan — cutting her teeth in her first major mission. Chouhan helped identify 11 seniors who were accused of the brutal ragging of a group of first-year MBBS students in July this year,
Posted at Sanyogitaganj police station in Indore, Shalini Chauhan was recently inducted into the force. Her father, a policeman, died in 2010 and her mother died a year later. Inspired by her father, she joined the force.
Mission MGM was her first operation. Chauhan gathered enough information to crack a blind case that had thwarted investigators for over five months.
Dressed in jeans and a top and toting a bag filled with books, she slipped into the role of a nurse though she is a commerce graduate.
“Our officer in-charge Tehzib Qazi and SI Satyajeet Chouhan, who was leading the investigation, had pointed out the students I was supposed to keep a watch on. I used to spend five-six hours at the canteen every day, at intervals so that it would seem like I am also working and not just hanging around there all day, and talking to all kinds of people there. Slowly, we could single out the seniors who were ragging freshers,” Shalini told TOI. In all these weeks, no one realised that she had nothing to do with medicine. “No one had a clue,” she said, flashing the smile that had disarmed the very suspects she was investigating. “No one ever took me for anyone else,” she laughed.
Qazi credits the success of the operation to the hard work by his team. “This was an entirely blind case. We had received an anonymous complaint with screenshots of WhatsApp conversations between seniors and juniors and of the locations (of apartments) sent by the seniors where the juniors were called for ragging,” Qazi said, adding that an undercover team was formed to visit the college and hostels and talk to the students.