Rai attended the MGM Medical College in Indore from 2003 to 2007. There, he noticed several irregularities that allowed the children of bureaucrats and politicians to do well despite not attending classes or exams.[2] He became suspicious in 2005 when he attended his MD exams and found that many of the top qualified students were from the same hostel block. At that time, he did not raise the issue as he was a junior. He then visited the state capital Bhopal to alert the government authorities. According to him, he saw a junior doctor Deepak Yadav and others manipulating medical exam forms, which made him suspect a scam. In 2008, he met his batchmate Jadgish Sagar (later found to be the kingpin of the Vyapam scam) at the wedding of a common friend. Sagar had left a suitcase at the wedding venue. When he did not return for a long time, Rai opened the suitcase to look for Sagar's contact information. In the suitcase, he found several Pre-Medical Test (PMT) admission forms and photographs.[2]
After finishing his post-graduation, Rai joined the college as a faculty member. In 2009, he decided to expose the irregularities in the medical exams, and filed a complaint with MPPEB. The board formed a committee to investigate the matter and discovered that 280 proxy candidates had impersonated the actual candidates in the exams.[2]
Rai believed the scam to be much bigger, and suspected involvement of politicians and bureaucrats in it. After having filed repeated complaints and receiving no response, finally he filed a Public Interest Litigation requesting investigation into the scam in July 2013. The subsequent investigation, led by a Special Investigation Team (SIT), resulted in arrests of several politicians including the state's former education minister. He also filed a petition in Supreme Court of India to hand over the investigation of DMAT scam, a private medical college admission scam.[4] Since 2005, he has filed more than 1000 RTI applications, including the clinical drug trials with the Drug Controller General of India (DGCI).[5]