Search Page

In a bid to encourage transparency and stamp out corruption and fraud in universities, India's education ministry is preparing guidelines that will for the first time force private higher education institutions to make their accounts public.

The government has appointed a task force to create a national database of academic qualifications to ensure confidentiality, authenticity, online verification and easy retrieval of degrees.

Education found that students of Class 8 and 9 were answering question papers at an under-graduate exam in Azamgarh district with the help of invigilators. The investigators have also known that the students have taken money from the original aspirants who had paid them to get the paper solved.

Operaciones y Descuentos Diversos, S.A. (Oddisa), a company chosen to prepare and distribute school lunches is under investigation for misappropriation of funds and money laundering. The many transactions, including accounts in Barbados, Luxembourg, and Paris, plus reports from schools in the provinces that stores of school-lunch products were burgled and other warehouses burned down, made it impossible to recover records.

Government will create 12 new central universities, adding to the 18 that currently exist. However, if India invests large amounts of money and human capital into academic improvement and expansion, without undertaking strategies to ensure that corruption and the entrenched control of bureaucracy will not waste the investment, a failure will be assured.