Education Scams in India: 500 engineering colleges face shutdown (2010)
Education Scams in India :Around 500 of the 692 engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh are not up to the mark,according to the standards set for admission row,and infrastructure,and especially a qualified faculty they need to be closed down,officials of state’s technical education department have stated.
“Most of our engineering colleges in the state lack these basic requirements of infrastructure and faculty even though they have very good buildings; all such colleges should be shut down,” state Council of Higher Education Secretary,Christopher.
Many are pleased with the expansion of engineering colleges in the state but no one cares about the quality of the colleges.
The Chief Minister K Rosiaiah was also informed about the situation, who immediately ordered the concerned authorities to “act tough “and ensure that the managements of the colleges adhere to the set standard strictly.
Therefore the state government formed a committee with Technical Education Commissioner K Lakshminarayana as chairman with the task to inspect engineering colleges to find out infrastructure and faculty availability.
Citing a NASSCOM study,Christopher said that while the Andhra Pradesh was producing only five to eight per cent “employable engineering graduates” every year against the national rate of 25 per cent.
Another reason which might lead to the shutdown of more than 200 engineering colleges across the state might be due to some severe issues like shortage of students.
Of the 2. From the total number of engineering colleges available in the state 67 lakh and after the phase-1 counselling more than 95000 remained unfilled.
About 2. This year 60 lakh students cleared the engineering, agriculture and medical Common Entrance Test (CET) but over a lakh of them didn’t even appear for the counselling for admission in various colleges as per the study.
For the convenor quota where the seats are filled during the counselling process there were 31,968 seats that remained unfilled while in the management quota there were no takers.
The strife over the demand for and against the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh has left majority of the engineering colleges in the Telangana region high and dry as students prefer not to join them, given the violence being perpetrated by the pro-statehood agitators.
This resulted in a situation where, for the first time in many years, students from the state have opted for colleges in the neighbouring Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.
Andhra takes action against 2,000 fake colleges
The government of Andhra Pradesh has resolved to lodge criminal complaints against 2000 fake nursing, engineering and junior colleges that were claiming huge sum of money under the self-financed tuition fee reimbursement scheme. Initiated by the late YS Rajasekhara Reddy, tuition fee was refunded to the students from the minority community and economically weaker section of the society whose family income is below one lakh rupees per annum.
The government has also noticed many incidences of fraud such as students who were claiming to be minorities were also claiming to be economically challenged. It was also these students who quantified their losses with what they wanted recovered from, or claimed reimbursement from, two or more sources.
Education Scam: Huge US scam ‘milking’ Indian students (2011)
Its just a tip of an iceberg of the US education con tricks where Indian students are the prime target.
This American visa scandal at Tri Valley University, California that has claimed the future of as many as hundreds of Indian students is but the pretext and there are at least a thousand such universities in the US today, says a study.
“Other colleges – most of them unaccredited – use complex federal rules to enroll foreign students only and charge them over USD 3,000 for an opportunity to work in America legally,” the Chronicle of Higher Education report stated.
These educational institutes exist mostly in California and Virginia where the laws are lenient and can with good reasons term many of their practises as rather peculiar – for instance, some of their classes are held on not more than 3 weekends per a semester, the report said.
“These colleges bring thousands of foreign students and make millions of dollars of revenues because they can – thanks to the US government’s blessing to assist students with visas,” it said, increasingly, while these institutions have become quite popular among Indians seeking full time employment abroad, they have remained virtually unknown in the US.
According to the twelve interviews with Chronicle, students studying at these institutions believe that an American degree, any American degree would make them more employable or fetch them a promotion back home, the report stated.
“They say they choose these unaccredited colleges for their flexibility,their low cost,academic quality and because of the recommendations of other students from their home region. In online forums,students are more blunt: What they actually discuss is who will allow the parties to work ‘from Day 1’,” it said.
In their report, the officials from the homeland-security say that they are in a position to deny the existence of other Tri-Valleys; however, none of them was willing to either discuss or even acknowledge investigations that are ongoing in the present.
“They agree with the arguments as to why regulations concerning the employment of the foreign students are open to abuse.
These areas are ripe for abuse,” said a top administrator with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees 10,300 schools and colleges that issue visa documents.
‘We look very closely,’ said a voice. Choosing to believe the reports that say that the agency is doing the best it can with the tools and power it was granted, this increase in fees – the system is entirely self-financed – will fund the formation of a new enforcement team that only handles school and college violations, as well as the generation of a 60-strong team of regional relations the body would provide representatives for more on-site assessment of colleges.
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According to the data provided it has been established that the said university has a population of 1,555 students. On average, it was found that as high as 95 per cent of these students are Indian nationals. The university was shutdown on grounds of issuing multitude of visas illegally.
ED probes Rs 5,000 cr education scam with roots in Sikkim pvt univ (2015)
In its biggest operation in a presumed education fraud case, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) today froze properties, including land and buildings, of a Sikkim-based private university involved in allegedly conning hundreds of students into paying for fake degrees.
Read About : Liquor Scam India
The agency has claimed cash of Rs 25 crore which was frozen in bank accounts under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) while the rest of the seizure amount pertains to the land assets of the EIILM across Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand West Bengal and Haryana.
Assets of the university and others to the tune of Rs 110 crore were freeze under money laundering laws An official, who accessed the attachment order, said, “Many fake degrees and certificates in the name of the university and others were sold to the gullible aspirants while there were several complaints of cheating and fraud recorded against the institution. ”
This is the first big action under money laundering laws in an alleged education scam case in the country.
An attempt to contact the university was unsuccessful on phone numbers that were provided in its web site were found to be “inactive”. As for this there was no response to emails sent in this regard.
Other sources revealed that the ED investigations exposed how the university management and owners had been engaging in what the agency described as ‘laundering’ of cash deemed to have been unlawfully attained from students in form of curriculum and tuition fee through acquisition of large pieces of land and creating balances in bank accounts all over the country.
They said that the university and its owners were indulging in tainted transaction by charging and giving illegal loans and making purchases in round about manner within the organisations promoted by them.
NEET Scam : Millions of students at risk India’s elite exams hit by corruption
High stakes test preparing students for medical schools and research programs in India have raised suspicion of latest offences like corruption and paper leakage and the fate of more than three million students rests with the verdict.
Neet Scam: The University Grants Commission or UGC, an organisation under India’s Ministry of Education conducts the national level tests including the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test for students who want to pursue medical education known as NEET which has been at the centre of controversies over cheating.
The much awaited examination results on June 4 clearly showed anomalies in the marks obtained and a high incidence of students obtaining ‘topper’ marks; this came concurrently with arrests carried out in various parts of the country, in relation to alleged paper leaks and multimillion dollar cheating rackets.
It was after this that several students have sought justice from the Supreme Court and State High Courts, sit on dharna in scorching heat, seek help on social media to get an independent investigation done and re trial about this neet scam. About 2. About 4 million students sat for the NEET exam in order to get into 100,000 spaces for medical colleges and universities.
On 19 June the new coalition headed by Narendra Modi also abolished the National Eligibility Test (NET) that sets candidates for the public-funded research fellowship; one million students passed the test on the very day the government abolished it. This came after education minister in India, Dharmendra Pradhan said that the questions were leaked in the darknet and were shared on an application called Telegram earlier this week.
NTA Scam
The minister however failed to explain how the paper was a breached or violated. “It is a sorry that question leak is an institutional failure from the NTA We want to assure you that that the outcome with reform committee and action will be taken,” he said. “We won’t negotiate for the theme of transparency here, you have students’ welfare at heart. ”
“The NTA literally has one job to do [to conduct exams] and it has failed miserably,” said Rishi Shukla, a law research scholar in Lucknow who has helped on various legal proceedings against the NTA.
Two students got 719 and 718 marks respectively out of 720 which is scientifically not possible under NEET’s marking system where +4 is given for right answer and -1 for wrong answer which fuelled mistrust from several students who accused of malpractice in the results.
To this, the NTA provided an explanation that several students were given what is referred to as grace marks, which are given freely by examiners and these are given in cases where learners lost a lot of time during the tests through circumstances beyond their control.
Finally, it reported to the Supreme Court in a hearing that the agency would withhold the grace marks and retest the 1,563 students who were given it.
“This agency was constituted in 2013 saying they are going to centralise the examination and prevent leakage and corruption at lower levels and now they do not have face left.
The NEET is a test that covers physics, biology and chemistry with 180 questions and the examination was conducted in over 4500 centres across the country and the responses where in multiple choices by marking bubbles that correspond to different answers.
While 304 students scored 700 marks or more in 2023, the pass-offering this year was 2-one thousand and one-hundred. Ranking in NEET is crucial to the admission process in a medical school in India given the fact that the examination attracts a lot of competition.
When questioned, the NTA said the high scoring was due to ‘greater number of candidates,’ which increased nearly by 300,000 from the 2023 set. However, questions over the integrity of the exam aside, the unusually high marks this year pose another challenge: Earlier, one needed an average of 550 marks to get through government-run medical colleges which actually offer 56,000 seats in all across the country.
Not any more. The remaining seats are in private schools that charge exponentially higher fees than government colleges.
For aspirants like 19-year-old Pratibha, this reality represents the end of a dream. She said she does not trust the re-examination promised by the NTA for students awarded grace marks.
“This re-test is an eye wash because the government is clearly shielding corrupt people,” she said, speaking from her home in Odisha state on India’s east coast, requesting that her last name not be used because she fears punitive action.
“I have spent my teenage [years] for this dream to wear the white coat,” said Pratibha, breaking down on the call. “It all feels like a waste now. I have scored good marks but not the rank. My family does not have money to send me to a private college. ”
