An Indian man who allegedly posed as British cardiologist Dr N John Camm has been arrested for performing unauthorised surgeries that reportedly caused the deaths of seven patients at a Christian missionary hospital.
Narendra Vikramaditya Yadav, 53, is accused of faking medical degrees, impersonating the renowned British cardiologist, and working at hospitals across India for nearly two decades.
Just hours before his arrest on Monday, he had even filed a legal notice seeking 50m Indian rupees (£455,000) from those accusing him of impersonation.
Mr Yadav worked as Dr Camm at Mission Hospital in Damoh in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.
He faces charges of forgery, fraud and endangering lives. The hospital has additionally accused him of theft.
He has denied all allegations.
“Nobody suspected him of being a fake doctor. He was good at his job and acted like a big-time professor,” an unidentified senior official at the hospital told The Indian Express.
An investigation by Indian broadcaster NDTV found Mr Yadav’s claimed medical degrees – MBBS, MRCP from London and DM in cardiology – appeared to be fake. The MBBS registration number reportedly belonged to a woman, it said, and there were no credible records of his other “qualifications”.
Police said Mr Yadav’s papers and devices pointed to fabricated identities and they were testing his medical knowledge to determine if he had any real expertise. Mr Yadav had reportedly been impersonating the UK doctor in Madhya Pradesh for 7-8 years.
He is Prof N John Camm, a fake doctor.
— Dr Nimo Yadav 2.0 (@niiravmodi) April 5, 2025
His real name is Narendra vikramaditya yadav. He impersonated a doctor named N John Camm from UK.
He is a BJP supporter and want BJP to rule over Indian till eternity.
Way back in 2023 he passed casteist slurs on lower caste people of… pic.twitter.com/1eDQzdyaLR
In his short stint at the Damoh hospital, police said, Mr Yadav handled 64 surgeries, including 45 angioplasties. He came under the scanner in February when Damoh’s Child Welfare Committee flagged multiple patient deaths under his watch.
Mr Yadav soon disappeared without any notice. The president of the Child Welfare Committee, Deepak Tiwari, said they grew suspicious of the man’s medical expertise and discovered online that he faced criminal cases in at least three states.
Mr Yadav’s suspected medical fraud dated back to at least 2006, when he operated at the Apollo Hospital in Chhattisgarh, including on former state assembly Speaker Rajendra Prasad Shukla. He allegedly caused the deaths of eight patients in his time there.
An investigation back then had also raised doubts about his MBBS degree.
“The identity theft cropped up first about five years ago, at least to my knowledge. It was very disconcerting. He claimed at various times to both be me and to have been trained by me at St George’s Hospital in London,” the real Dr Camm told The Indian Express.
Damoh’s police chief told BBC Hindi that Mr Yadav had “worked on a total of 64 cases, including 45 cases of angioplasty, which led to seven patient deaths”.
Madhya Pradesh chief minister Mohan Yadav said the state had launched an investigation.
Questions about Mr Yadav’s identity had surfaced multiple times over the years. In a 2019 blog, BBC reported, he falsely claimed to have trained under British cardiologist Prof A John Camm and to have worked in top hospitals worldwide.
A fake Doctor, Prof N John Camm, posed as UK-based cardiologist, allegedly forged documents to pass off as a UK-based cardiologist and conducted heart surgeries at the hospital, Operates at Madhya Pradesh hospital; 7 dead.
— Mohammed Zubair (@zoo_bear) April 5, 2025
I had exposed this fake 'Nationalist' Doctor in 2023. https://t.co/HoLzw625jK
Mr Yadav was sent to five days of police custody after appearing before a local court. “The accused told us he was living in Kanpur. Some of his documents were of Uttarakhand and he claims his wife was from that state,” a police officer told The Indian Express.
In a 2021 blog on Medium, Mr Yadav claimed to be developing the John Camm Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, a 5,000-bed super speciality hospital in the northern state of Rajasthan, under the leadership of “Dr N John Camm, renowned Interventional Cardiologist from Germany”.
He also claimed similar healthcare facilities were being planned in Vietnam and Tanzania, backed by an international team of doctors.
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