Minister, ex-guv get an inkling of scam in distance education

Outreach centres raided in B’lore; Complaint galore against G’barga varsity.

Students of distance education courses offered by the Karnataka State Open University and the Gulbarga University are left in the lurch, as the institutions have entered into a pact with private institutions to run the outreach centres, allegedly violating rules. 

During a raid in Bangalore on Tuesday, Medical Education Minister S A Ramdas found that KSOU had signed an MoU with the YGen Management Consulting Private Limited to offer a few paramedical courses. 

He was in for a shock when he arrived on the 27th Main Road of JP Nagar 1st Phase to conduct an inspection at the registered office of YGen.

When the inspection team went to the spot, Dipankar Choudhury, the Chief Executive Officer of YGen, was missing. All that the minister found was a two-storey house, with notice boards, office materials and other equipment to show that an academic institution was being run from the house. Choudhury’s wife and child restricted themselves to a room and did not interact with the media. 

A nameboard stating Choudhury as CEO of YGen, a finishing school as they called it, was missing by afternoon after the occupants got a clue about the raid.

Another shocker awaited the minister when he visited the administrative office of YGen in Dollars Colony in JP Nagar 4th Phase.

A family, which had taken the building on rent, said Choudhury had left the house a month ago. 

The residents of the area confirmed that there was an office in the building, where some 30 people worked throughout the day.

Similar was the case when the inspection team visited Bangalore Education Resources (BER), which is associated with Vedant, New Delhi, as a franchisee and had signed a similar MoU with KSOU. 

Two offices, as per the addresses mentioned in the MoU, were found abandoned. BER had signed the MoU stating that it would offer courses in Diploma, BSc and MSc degrees in medical lab technology.

Ramdas said the raids were conducted in Bangalore, following an inquiry report submitted by a two-member committee, that was tasked to look into the spurt of advertisements by such institutes offering admissions for this academic year.

Jois complains to Guv

Rajya Sabha member M Rama Jois has written to Governor H R Bhardwaj alleging a similar case of irregularities in the Gulbarga University, which also has entrusted management of its outreach centres to YGen. 

The former chief justice of Punjab and Haryana High Court has complained to the Governor against the Gulbarga University’s dubious way of running outreach institutions in the guise of distance education without approval of necessary statutes by the chancellor.

He has urged Bhardwaj, the chancellor of the university, to immediately withhold approval of the statutes.

Jois had said that YGen had collected huge sums of money from the students in the outreach centres in various parts of the country. 

Based on the petition filed by University Syndicate member Raghavendra Kulkarni, Justice Rama Jois has said that many students had paid large amounts of money for the courses through external mode without the approval of the statutes.

A detailed inquiry was necessary on how the said agency, registered under the Company Act, could collect money from students, Dr Jois said, “Prima facie, it appears that the Gulbarga University has mortgaged itself to the said company which is wholly impermissible and this should be immediately stopped,” he added.

Following this letter, it is learnt that the Governor summoned Gulbarga University Vice-Chancellor E T Puttaiah, Registrar S L Hiremath and other senior officials of the Higher Education department for consultation.

Speaking to Deccan Herald over the phone from Bangalore, Registrar Hiremath on Tuesday said that there was some problem with the outreach centres and the university was having second thoughts about running the programmes. 

He claimed that only provisional admission was made by the agencies and the university neither admitted any student nor collected any fee from them. The inordinate delay in the approval of the statutes was the root cause for the trouble, Hiremath said.