Twisted

...Talent. That was the title of the Indian Express report published on 3rd July where a racket was busted where IIT student caught impersonating. Today The Telegraph reports an engineering student being killed in recruitment rivalry between two private colleges of south. According to the report, the senior students in these colleges get a certain percentage of the capitation fee for every freshers they recruit and for which kidnapping, intimidation, gang war are not uncommon.

Such students are part of the campus community and in minority. The majority of the students need to play an active role to avoid such derailment of the fellow students. Engineering students, in general do not like enforcement of strict disciplines, policing in hostels by authorities. Also this is the transition phase in their life where they learn to own up responsibilities before entering professional life. It will be good to see if they can manage their affair well. This needs self-discipline, accountability on their part on how they run their business and sending out SOS to admin. if they find that their best effort is failing to protect themselves and before such incidents happen. This may help avoid embarrassments like these which not only run individual career/life but also bring disrepute to fellow students, institute, nation - increases tension of guardian, family members and as a whole bring a lot of negativity about campus life which otherwise is the best part of one's life!
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Indian Express :: 03 July 2010

Twisted talent: IITian impersonated others in entrance exam for money

Santosh Singh, Sat Jul 03 2010,

Patna: They entered India’s top engineering colleges and then went about helping others get in — for a price. Police in Patna say they have busted a racket in which enginnering graduates and B.Tech students, including one from IIT Delhi, impersonated aspirants from Bihar, Orissa, Jharkhand, UP and Delhi at entrance exams.

A Patna Police team swooped on Kaushal Kumar, a B.Tech from an Orissa engineering college and the alleged kingpin of the racket, in Bhubaneswar today. Three others — IIT Delhi student Ankur Agrawal, Kalinga Engineering College student Abhinav Anand, and Gopalganj (Bihar) resident Ajay Anand — were arrested from a hotel in Patna on Thursday. Ajay secured the 6,814th rank at the AIEEE this year, allegedly after Ankur appeared for him.

“Now that we have arrested the ringleader Kaushal, we will get to know the full spread of the network, and whether it involves other students from IITs,” Patna SP Manu Maharaj told The Indian Express.

Maharaj said Kaushal ran a placement cell and facilitated engineering admissions, but later switched to getting engineering students to write entrance exams for others. Abhinav ’s job was to scout for talented students willing to impersonate for money.

“Abhinav, who knew Ankur from their days together at coaching institutes in Kota, convinced him to appear for four engineering entrance exams in 2009 and 2010,” Maharaj said. Ankur, he added, cracked exams for three fake candidates: two in 2009, one in 2010.

Gandhi Maidan police station in-charge Inspector Aman Kumar, who arrested Ankur and Abhinav, said Kaushal collected Rs 4 lakh from each “successful” candidate.

“Ankur was likely to get Rs 1 lakh as his share from the deal struck with Ajay Anand. We seized Rs 60 lakh in cash and some photocopies of admission cards,” Inspector Kumar said. Ankur, he said, had come to Patna to collect his money.
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Tech student killed in recruitment rivalry
G.C. SHEKHAR

Chennai, July 5: Rivalry among private institutes to poach each other’s prospective freshers, with college seniors and alumni allegedly paid to act as touts and even kidnappers, has led to a student being beaten to death in Chennai.

Jharkhand boy Nirbhay Kumar Singh, a third-year BTech student and “recruiter” for MGR (Deemed) University, was attacked with clubs by a rival gang of students from Satyabhama (Deemed) University last night, police said. He died of his head injuries today.

Officers said MGR and Satyabhama were among the institutes that paid their current and former students to recruit freshers, who would shell out hefty capitation fees for management quota seats. The rivalry among these groups of recruiters, they said, sometimes led to gang fights over the kidnapping of each other’s freshers.

Nirbhay, 21, had arranged to admit Harshik Singh, a fellow student from Jharkhand, to his university but the rival gang had spirited him away and got him enrolled in Satyabhama, the police said. Nirbhay, son of a railway inspector in Ranchi, had come on a motorbike to the city’s Nilankarai area, looking for Harshik, when he was attacked.

Since there are about 100 private engineering colleges within 70km of Chennai, many of which have been struggling to fill their seats, the competition for freshers is fierce.

The recruitment racket, which mainly involves north Indian students, has become so lucrative that many former students, most of whom have not cleared their college arrears, are now full-time recruiters. They have fanned out to their hometowns and nearby villages scouting for prospective students for Chennai’s engineering colleges.

“We get up to Rs 50,000 per student depending on the capitation fee he pays,” said an ex-student of Satyabhama who lives near his old institute.

Senior students in their third or fourth year are exempted from tuition or hostel fees, instead of being paid money, if they bring in new students, police sources said.

An officer at Nilankarai police station said that freshers “brought” for admission to a particular institute were often kidnapped by gangs from a different college and forcibly enrolled with the latter institute.

“They have safe houses where such abducted students are kept till their admission process is over,” the officer said.

About 10,000 students from Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Uttaranchal study in three private universities — SRM, Satyabhama and MGR. Another 3,000-odd students from these states are enrolled in 30 private engineering colleges located around Chennai, police sources said.

In February, Vikas Singh, a fourth-year student of Satyabhama, was kidnapped by the rival gang of Sanjeev Singh and confined to a room in Puducherry. Vikas and Sanjeev, both from Bihar, had clashed over recruiting students from their home state.

Later, while Vikas was being brought to Chennai, the car overturned on the highway. Vikas used the mobile of one of his injured captors to call his father, then joint commissioner in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh. The father then called the Tamil Nadu police chief, which led to Vikas’s rescue and the racket coming to light.

The managements of the private universities and colleges claim they have nothing to do with the racket.

“Some of the students and their parents, many of them in top government positions in their respective states, spread the word around that any admission from their states can happen only through these student recruiters.

And if the college charges a capitation fee of Rs 4 lakh, these students mark it up as Rs 4.5 lakh and walk away with the extra Rs 50,000,” a placement officer of a private college said.