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A ruling by India's Supreme Court that appointments for highly specialised teaching positions in medical colleges cannot be subject to affirmative action caste-based quotas has led to a political uproar that has disrupted the current session of parliament, where a number of higher education bills are pending. The issue of caste reservations is highly political, with elections due in five states and national elections scheduled for 2013.

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.

Police are investigating an Indian university suspected of issuing fake PhDs after it awarded more than 400 doctorates in a single year. They have arrested four senior officials from CMJ University in the northeastern state of Meghalaya on suspicion of fraud and forgery and are hunting for the chancellor, who has fled.

The education sector is riddled with most instances of public corruption and irregularities in Uttar Pradesh, in the state Lok Ayukta. The irregularities relate to the alleged encroachment on the forest Gram Sabha Land and siphoning off local area development (LAD) funds by politicians. Locals are demanding a probe into the allegations.

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.