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.

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.

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.

Four teachers of a higher secondary school at Hosur in Tamil Nadu were arrested on Friday for allegedly leaking the question paper for the Class 12 board exam through WhatsApp. Police identified the accused who was on exam duty at the Matriculation Higher School on Wednesday. He took the photo of the mathematics question paper with his smartphone and sent it to other teachers through WhatsApp.

Scandal and large scale cheating. Images of dozens of parents climbing the walls of an examination building to help their children was a scandal and spread like gun powder on the Web. Dozens of persons, mobile telephones and cheat sheets in hand, were to be seen hanging onto window sills of a building where end-of-term exams were being held.

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.

A medical school admission examinations scandal in India has turned into a veritable whodunit with thousands of arrests, mysterious deaths and the suspected involvement of top politicians and bureaucrats.

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.