The government plans to bring in a law to stop rampant plagiarism in academia, with punishment ranging from a warning to deregistration in the case of students and dismissal from service for teachers. Higher education regulator University Grants Commission (UGC) is finalising a draft law — the first of its kind — that is likely to be sent to the human resource development ministry for further action by June-end. Official sources said the government intends to seek parliamentary approval for the law this year itself.

About 3,000 schoolteachers in Bihar, who allegedly used fake degree certificates to get jobs, have resigned till date apprehending legal action. Earlier, the state government admitted that it recruited more than 300,000 contract teachers without verifying their educational and professional degrees. The petitioner of the probe said he has collected documents as evidence through Right to Information queries to prove that thousands of teachers used forged degrees to get jobs.

Information related to students, teachers and schools will be a click away, from this academic year. The information will soon be available on a website hosted by the National Informatics Centre. The student database will help teachers and parents concentrate on learning levels. The online database will also be used to arrest the drop-out rate among students.

Dozens of people were filmed scaling the walls of a school in Hajipur to fraudulently provide students with answers to exam questions. 

Four teachers of a higher secondary school at Hosur in Tamil Nadu were arrested on Friday for allegedly leaking the question paper for the Class 12 board exam through WhatsApp. Police identified the accused who was on exam duty at the Matriculation Higher School on Wednesday. He took the photo of the mathematics question paper with his smartphone and sent it to other teachers through WhatsApp.

A ruling by India's Supreme Court that appointments for highly specialised teaching positions in medical colleges cannot be subject to affirmative action caste-based quotas has led to a political uproar that has disrupted the current session of parliament, where a number of higher education bills are pending. The issue of caste reservations is highly political, with elections due in five states and national elections scheduled for 2013.

After studying for two years to be a teacher, one student found out that the degree her school offers is worthless. It is a story being replayed across many Indian cities. Poorly regulated, unaccredited and often entirely fake colleges have sprung up as demand for higher education accelerates, driven by rising aspirations and a bulging youth population.