Search Page

In an effort to control increasing cases of plagiarism and low quality research, the All India Council for Technical Education, AICTE, is to launch Project Factory – an online repository aimed at capturing abstracts of all postgraduate projects.

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.

The allegedly tainted Tri-Valley University might not be the only US educational institution to indulge in immigration fraud. Overseas education consultants from Andhra Pradesh who have details of educational institutions in the US note that more universities have been violating immigration rules while admitting students.

India's education ministry appears to have hit a snag in its anticorruption campaign. The Supreme Court ordered the federal government to conduct a review of 44 "deemed universities" that the ministry had stripped of university status last February.

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.

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.

Over 100,000 fake certificates of various Indian universities have been found in a Bihar town. The absence of industries and other business opportunities forces young men and women in Bihar to apply for jobs in government-run schools and also resort to fake certificates. Only two days ago, the government had rejected more than four million applications to check a fake degree racket and other irregularities during a teacher recruitment drive for government-run schools.

The IIEP/UNESCO report "Corrupt schools, corrupt universities: What can be done" has identified private tuition as a major source of "unethical behavior" in India, observing that it has become a major industry, consuming a considerable amount of parents' money and pupils' time. Together with private tuitions, two other major problems that face the Indian education system are the manipulation of entrance test scores and teachers absenteeism.