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.

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.

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.

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.

Two primary and secondary teacher have been suspended for selling textbooks that belonged to the school, the textbooks meant for free distribution by the District Institute of Educational Training (DIET), among students were seized from a scrap dealer's shop.

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.

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 National Council for Teacher Education has drafted a professional code for school teachers that aims to restore "dignity and integrity" to the vocation of teaching. Everyone would agree that the vocation needs more respect than it receives now, but enforcing ethics must come after and not before dealing with the many and deep-rooted ills that plague school education in the country.