According to an opposition leader, the businessman Agarwal's pledge last week of $1-billion to set up Vedanta University, in the South Indian state of Orissa, is a gimmick to divert attention from his corrupt mining deal with the state's government. The $1-billion pledge, which if realized would be the largest gift ever made to a higher-education institution, is intended to create a multidisciplinary elite university for 100,000 students that would open in 2008.

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.

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.

Starting this year, the Bihar government will transfer the benefits of education schemes such as scholarships and school uniforms, as well as social welfare schemes such as old age and widow pensions, directly to the beneficiaries to reduce red tape and the possibility of mid-level officials pocketing part of the benefits. For schools, the government order brings the challenge of opening up to 25 million bank accounts for students from 69,500 primary and middle schools and 4,500 secondary and higher secondary schools.

Universities may attract penalty, including a freeze of grants, if its teachers are found to be guiding more than eight PhD students at any given point in time as part of a drive to plug lacunae in research. The University Grants Commission will ask all universities to have anti-plagiarism software to ensure that the thesis papers reflect genuine research. The step assumes significance against the backdrop of some agencies offering their services to research scholars to draft theses for them for a fee.

A preliminary probe conducted by the Lucknow University (LU), during the ongoing undergraduate examination at an associated college, evoked suspicion of large scale use of unfair means at the college. In the observation report submitted to the chief proctor by the anti-copying squad, the self-financed college has been suspected of carrying on activities of mass cheating.

Universities across the country may now have to resort to cashless means like bank transfers, cheques and credit/debit cards while making use of periodic funds from University Grants Commission (UGC). The commission said the move was in order to bring in accountability, transparency and seamlessness in the process of transfer of grants. The commission said it has virtually made payments cashless and decreased the interface between stakeholders and employees of the organisation.

In a decision intended to curb the widespread sale of seats in professional colleges, India's Supreme Court has ordered that private institutions may no longer demand the "donation" of extra, upfront fees from new students. Medical and engineering colleges now demand upfront payments of tens of thousands of dollars, from students whose test scores do not qualify them for places.