'It is a common practice in UP'

Vijay Upadhyay

Agra. At a time when the entire country is ringing with the answer-sheet evaluation scam of Meerut University where answer-sheets of graduates and postgraduate students were found being evaluated by high-school students and four people were arrested in the case, a UP government official made a stunning disclosure that such scams were too common in Uttar Pradesh. He said he had informed the UP government in another university of the state about a similar scam one-year back.

Talking to The Pioneer, the official, on being assured of the secrecy of his identity, said that it was incorrect to say that the Meerut incident was an anomaly as this has been a usual practice in almost all UP universities and no government ever bothered to take any action in this regard.

He revealed that he came to know about this deep-rooted practice in the state universities in 2005 while working as the finance controller in one of these Universities. He said that he came across some evaluation bills submitted by one Delhi-based professor, who had been given about nine lakh answer-sheets for evaluation and who later presented evaluation bills worth Rs 50 thousand per evaluator, in fictitious names to the University.

He said, when he objected on passing the bills without confirming the identity of the evaluator, he was told by the Vice-Chancellor to pass the bills and this Delhi based professor was paid almost Rs 1 crore from the University for getting these copies evaluated despite his objections.

Similarly, he said, there was a government ruling that no evaluator would receive more than 1000 - 1200 copies for evaluation but it was being hardly followed anywhere. Even in the university where he had served, each evaluator had raised bills for more than 10 thousand copies, which he had to pass under pressure.

Suspecting that the evaluation of these copies had been outsourced for evaluation by school-kids, he made a formal complaint to the state government requesting a CBI inquiry in the scam, that could badly reflect on the academic reputation of UP universities, but no action was taken by the government and the issue was allowed to die its own death.

Commenting on this practice followed in the UP universities, a former Vice-Chancellor of Dr BR Ambedkar University, Agra said that it was due to this greed of the academicians to earn more and more money, that the reputation of the universities of Uttar Pradesh had plummeted to the bottom. Each senior official involved with the University took the answer sheet evaluation as a chance to earn money in a windfall and this tendency was not showing any signs of changing.

Suggesting a way out of such scams, he said that the old custom of centralised evaluation was the best possible way to prevent such scandals.