Not too many humans might have forgotten Arindam Chaudhuri. Author, entrepreneur, and founding father of the now infamous Indian Institute of Planning and Management, he became hailed by many as a visionary and an influencer. At the flip of the century or thereabouts, many children rushed to get admitted to IIPM. After all, it turned into advertised as being better than the IIMs.
The writing has been on the wall for some time. It’s simply that no person cared to read between the mortar lines. Speculations around the institute’s credibility have been lengthy before Starting with a criminal conflict between IIPM and a mag. A probe then proved that the institute changed into spreading fake records via its advertisements. Finally, the University Grants Commission barred IIPM from issuing ranges and issued a phony college note. All of an unexpected, Chaudhuri’s residence of cards had collapsed.
While the curious case of Chaudhuri and IIPM stays as an alternative strange blot within the alternatively pedicured history of Indian private education, a new listing released with the aid of the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) exhibits details of nine fake universities in India that have specialized in awarding Doctor of Letters (DLitt) and Ph.D. levels. According to SFI’s letter, all one has to do is pay hefty cash. The declaration is a little extra surprising: the alleged list of degree recipients includes pinnacle bureaucrats, scholars, and teachers.
The SFI has written to the Ministry of Human Resource Development, worrying about a vigilant intervention, and has requested them to set up a high-stage committee that could inquire into those fake varsities. “Genuine researchers earn a doctoral degree after years of devoted work in their respective fields. Lack of stringent actions curbing the award of fake Ph.D. tiers is in some other way thinking and nullifying the genuine effort of scholars who paintings hard for a better part of their lifestyles,” reads the letter. “On a detailed take look, it has come to our notice that there may be an influential mafia community that helps this faux degree infrastructure, and it is also a surprising reality that a lot of those people who preserve those fake tiers are human beings in relatively influential positions,” it says.
These are the colleges that the listing has discovered — the University of Asia, The International Tamil University. Kings University, USA; Universal Tamil University; International Peace University, Germany; Indian Virtual University for Peace (IVUP), The Open International University for Complementary Medicines; Indian Peace University; and The International Economic University. “States like Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan are hubs for those establishments,” says Mayukh Biswas, SFI National General Secretary. “Upon searching the list, you may even locate that this mafia has provided you with Kings University. People might imagine that this is similar to King’s College London and fall prey to it,” he adds. How did it all begin?
CM Shanmukhadas is a former Madras University Professor who these days relocated to his homeland Koyilandi in Kozhikode. A few months ago, he was given to understand that a neighbor of his, a Homeopathic medical doctor, changed into an honorary Doctorate from the University of Asia. Now for Shanmukhadas, the information appeared peculiar. He tells us why. “I realize him for my part. He does not have a BHMS degree. Many humans in our locality are aware of this.” So, when this ‘physician’ Sreevaram Vasudevan presented a Ph.D. in Education Counselling, Shanmukhadas looked at the university’s website.
“The university says you can follow for a DLitt, which lets you prefix your call with a ‘Dr’ tag. This wasn’t a Ph.D. like Vasudevan claimed,” says Shanmukhadas. There has been something suspicious in the internet site — most of its pages had been static, while university websites normally have dynamic pages. “I was given in contact with creator Indu Menon and some different friends in IIT Madras, who immediately realized the website was not legitimate. This internet site changed into created on April 4, 2018. It has been up to date only ten times because then,” he says.