BANGALORE: You don't have to study hard or write your exams to get a certificate from a deemed university in the country or abroad. All you have to do is pay Rs 3,000 to Imran Hussain Nadir for the certificate.

Imran began selling fake certificates eight years ago. His friend Nadeem was his partner in crime till 2006. Police recovered fake degree and P-G certificates of Mysore, Bangalore Annamalai and Rajasthan Vidyapeeth universities, East Point College, Brindavan College, Oxford College, NIIT institute, Miranda Institute of Management and Studies and an MBA degree certificate from New Port .

DCP (Central) B N S Reddy said, "Imran got printouts of the real certificates, photo-embossed and laminated them. He sold them to students seeking jobs and overseas students who wanted certificates as proof. He charged between Rs 3,000 and Rs 10,000."

The Ministry of External Affairs and VTU are pushing for online verification of student certificates. This will allow foreign employers a more authentic and speedier means to crosscheck the candidates’ credentials

Deserving students can now waltz their way into blue chip companies or the Ivy League without the hassle of queuing up for marksheet verification. Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU) and the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) are putting together a system that will allow marks card verification at the click of a button.

The mammoth task of authenticating marksheets online was recently discussed by the Inter University Board (IUB), the all-important decision-making body on higher education issues. An official present in the IUB explained: “VTU will take up the online job on an experimental basis. If it’s a success, time consumed for verification will be cut down drastically.’’

Currently, after a foreign company issues an offer letter to a potential employee, it dispatches the certificates to the home varsity for verification. This process takes its own time. “But if the process is online, it helps both the company as well as the employer to complete the v erification soon,’’ added the official.

Higher education ministry sources said that MEA officials are expected to visit the VTU campus in Belgaum soon to hold discussions on online verification. The authorities are looking at connecting the students’ database to a portal without violating the confidentiality code as online uploading helps in tracking a student’s academic records. This is necessary in the backdrop of incidents of students getting involved in terrorist activities, sources said.

Some universities are mulling over adopting RFID technology that allows data to be stored on a microchip a tag that is affixed onto a product or certificate to be read wirelessly. However, RFID tags are expensive.  MEA is erecting a mechanism for online verification and authentication of educational qualifications by linking all universities to MEA’s server. This is being implemented by MEA in close co-operation with National Informatics Centre (NIC). The senior technical director and state information officer, NIC, Bangalore had recently requested IUB to furnish details in this regard.

The move has of course met with the total approval of recruitment agencies and companies. Zaheer, CEO of Truemen Management Consultancy Services, said, “If the process is happening online, it is definitely a welcome step. Right now, there is no way a company can verify the authenticity of marks cards directly. This has forced the companies to hire background verification agencies for verification, which in fact works out as an extra expenditure for us”.

Currently, the employee verification process is a time-consuming and expensive process. Background check companies charge anywhere between Rs 4,000 to Rs 5,000 for a candidate. The background checking process is done within two to three weeks after an offer letter is given. In case of discrepancy, the company gives a seven-day ultimatum for the candidate to clarify things and then do a re-verification. If the employee is found to have erred, his services get terminated. Most of the fudging is basically in the degree certificates/technical qualification or work experience.

Recently, a Hyderabad-based IT company had terminated 500 employees for producing fudged documents. Another IT major had fired 20 employees at its Kolkata centre for fake CVs. Even, a Bangalore-based tech company had asked 100 employees to quit as their resumes were misleading.

According to websites, people involved in the fake marksheet racket are highly professional. They create shell companies and let loose candidates in the industry who are supposed to have worked for these companies. According to First Advantage survey, 30 per cent of all resumes screened reported discrepancies. The company screened some two million resumes in 2006-07. And the problem is not just limited to freshers; shockingly, it goes up to the senior-most level too.

To tackle the fake certificates’ racket, many city-based IT companies are sharing database of job applicants (who have produced fake information) with other companies.

NASSCOM has stepped into the issue and has created the National Skills Registry (NSR), which has candidates personal, academic and employment details and is subjected to professional verification. It had almost 1,60,000 registrations by 2007 end.

According to NASSCOM’s website, this registry enables HR to sift within the industry with a minimum of paperwork and reference / verification checks. This initiative seeks to maintain online a central database of the educational qualifications and skill sets acquired by a person.

The employee would update information pertaining to these areas, which would be verified and certified by a third party (independent of NASSCOM and industry).

When the employee wants to shift to another job or another process, all he has to do is provide his prospective employer access to his record online. The record is owned and operated by the employee and is voluntary in nature. He decides who can have access to his record and for how long. The potential employer is also legally bound not to disclose the information so viewed to any other third party.

The employer can post information regarding any legal or criminal proceedings initiated against the employee, but only if a formal complaint has been lodged in a court of law or a police station.

Authenticity of the complaint would be checked to ensure that the employer or supervisor does not misuse the registry against the better interest of the employee.

The West Bengal Joint Entrance Examination (WBJEE 2008) for admission to undergraduate courses in Engineering/Technology/ Medical/Dental /Veterinary and Pharmacy in Universities/Colleges in West Bengal and B. Arch Course in Bengal Engineering and Science University, Shibpur and Jadavpur University scheduled to be held today (April 20, 2008) has been postponed by the WBJEE board after the physics, chemistry and biology papers were leaked.

The next date for the exam will be decided when the board meets next week with higher education minister Sudarshan Roychaudhuri and the higher education secretary in attendance.

Two persons, Arun Chowdhury and Mihir Dandapatt, were arrested on Saturday in West Midnapore's Ghatal, where the three papers were being sold for Rs 2.5 lacs.

The arrests came hours after the police received a call. The caller gave the police a cellphone number and said they would know abo-ut JEE papers being leaked after tracing the user of the mobile.

The police have informed JEE chairman Siddhartha Dutta and senior higher education officials about the sale of the papers. "The papers recovered from Ghatal were brought to the board's Salt Lake office for verification on Saturday morning," said a senior higher education department official.

"Figures and diagrams were missing. However, the rest of the questions were the same as those in the original papers. We immediately decided to defer WBJEE 2008," said the official.

The duplicate question papers were on physics, chemistry and biology. Significantly, mathematics was not among the papers recovered. "This is a clear indication that medical exam seats were the target," explained the official.