School admissions in Delhi follow a point system based on the guidelines laid out by the Department of Education: proximity of school from the residence, presence of older siblings studying in the same school, etc. In order to ensure admission of their children into Delhi’s leading private schools, parents commit blatant forgery and fraud. The government has therefore put in place new tools to make the admission procedure more transparent.

In the season of examination results and college admissions, we are again reminded of the dismal condition of the Indian education system. The Punjab School Education Board has, in an act of benevolence, granted 30 grace marks to Class 12 students. This helped lift the state’s pass percentage from 54% to 76%. In Gujarat, the pass percentage in Class 10 dropped from 73% in 2014-15 to 63% this year — which the state education minister attributes to the installation of CCTV cameras in examination centres that have checked cheating. Many Class 10 students in Gujarat could not answer elementary questions in a retest, despite securing over 80% in the objective section of the mathematics paper.

THE HRD Ministry is set to launch a programme next month that would probably be the world’s largest student tracking system, sources said. Shala Asmita (All School Monitoring, Individual Tracing Analysis) Yojana (SAY) aims to track the educational journey of close to 25 crore school students from Class I to Class XII across 15 lakh schools in the country. This online database will carry information about student attendance and enrolment, mid-day meal service, learning outcomes and infrastructural facilities, among other things, on one platform for both private and government schools.

Twenty-one people have been arrested after US authorities set up a fake university to expose immigration fraud. Officials said the accused knew that the University of Northern New Jersey did not exist, but they were unaware it was a ruse run by immigration agents. The defendants acted as brokers for more than 1,000 foreigners who sought to maintain student and work visas, prosecutors said. Most foreign nationals involved in the scheme came from China and India.

In India, university fraud is a national sport, practiced at all levels. Beginning with the former prime minister up to the former Delhi justice minister who allegedly fakes his qualification in … law. The increase in fake qualifications is undoubtedly linked to the lack of universities in the country, with some of the harshest selection processes in the world. Leaving the country to study overseas is so expensive that counterfeit diplomas from international universities abound.

The medical education sector in the state has turned out to be a platform for corruption. Critics have urged the government to ensure that the MBBS seats are allotted to those who have cleared the National Entrance-cum-Eligibility Test (NEET). They also urged the state government to frame a common policy on medical education.