The WBJEE scam

Mou Chakraborty, Sujit Nath, Subhendu Maiti
Kolkata, July 27, 2007
Mihir Kumar Jha, Ayan Mukhopadhyay, Babli Kazmi, Syed Abrar, Rupa Mazumdar.
The names may not mean anything to you, but they are a bunch of intelligent men and women engaged in a very lucrative racket. The business of building futures of hundreds of mediocre undeserving students at a hefty price. They are part of a huge gang whose tentacles spread across the country and the interesting bit is that its epicentre seems to be Kolkata.
Some members of the racket have been caught in the police net and the search is on for the others. The arrests have sent shudders down the collective spine of the administration, parents and the student community posing serious questions. Questions such as: Is the doctor treating my child one of those who got into the medical colleges with the help of a dummy candidate? Is the engineer building the hi-tech bridge part of the same racket?
The game is afoot and all the answers may not be available right now. But the recent developments have made the academic fraternity sit up and try to devise a foolproof system to thwart future attempts.
The director of state medical education Joyshree Mitra Ghosh, said, “I think there should be a change in the JEE system following the recent arrests. The new system should focus on the overall development of 10+2 students, instead of putting them through the rat race of securing a berth in MBBS or engineering.”
The West Bengal Joint Entrance Examination (WBJEE) board is not only planning a separate medical entrance exam board altogether but the engineering examination is also set for an overhaul. The department of higher education has asked the WBJEE board to discuss how the examination system can be made tamperproof. “The chairman of WBJEE board N.R. Banerjea is currently in the US and is scheduled to return on July 31. Once he returns we will hold a meeting,” said Bidyut Bhattacharya, member secretary of WBJEE board.
Some “unusual events” occurred during the two-day counselling of medical aspirants at Sarat Sadan in Howrah on June 23 and 24. A senior officer of the medical education department said, “About 10 candidates failed to show valid domicile certificates during the first day of counselling. But the next day, one senior official attached to the JEE produced five domicile certificates, proving the candidates had spent a minimum 10 years in the state. The certificates had been issued by a high profile MLA in Kolkata. Interestingly, the official is not involved with the counselling of medical aspirants.”
Other discrepancies have also come to light. A senior member of the counselling team said he noticed more than 50 per cent candidates from a JEE centre in Howrah had qualified for the medical course this year. That is unusual. A teacher in a medical college said, “I am sometimes surprised to find many students having done well in the JEE looking ordinary in class. Some cannot even follow what we teach in the classroom.”
“Often I have seen average students securing a berth in both the medical and engineering courses. One theory might be that they prepared well for the exams but then the academic standard of some of them really makes us raise the question whether the system has any loopholes,” said Malini Bhagat, principal of Mahadevi Birla High School.
Whether the academic top brass succeed in their attempts to revamp the system is a different story altogether, but the saga of a corrupt system with impersonators giving a step up to future doctors and engineers has been continuing for years.
For people running dubious coaching centres, securing admission to a top college is not a problem, if the guardian is willing to shell out a few lakhs. Once the money is exchanged, the aspiring candidate, is spotted within months, rubbing shoulders with the truly brilliant ones in top medical colleges and engineering institutes.
From College Street in Kolkata to Patna’s Mahendru Ghat; Durgapur to Bangalore, the racket reaches out to all corners of the country. It is agents that are the lifelines to these dubious coaching centres. The dummy candidates have their resumes at the disposal of all these centres. Whenever there is need for one, the agents get in touch with the impersonators. Take the case of Babli Kazmi who was arrested recently. She hails from Varanasi and had flown to Kolkata to appear in the exam for Rupa Mazumdar, also from Varanasi. Consider Syed Abrar from Bangalore. An engineer by profession, he had opened an institute to coach students seeking admission to engineering colleges. He played an important role in getting dummy candidates from all over the country for exams in Bangalore. The police have unearthed “experts” who are diligent enough to in crack various all-India exams such as the ones for railways and banking.
Investigating officers say that most of the coaching centres have links with each other and maintain a list of dummy candidates. They share information and also the cut money. The deputy commissioner of the detective department, Ajoy Kumar says, “The ring is spread all over the country. Kolkata has become their focal point of interest particularly due to the comparatively lesser risk factors here. The menace was not so prominent in Kolkata till the other day.”
But who are these dummy candidates and where do they stay? How do they manage to crack the tough questions of top examinations?
The aspiring candidates have two options: Option one — He or she can directly contact these coaching centres. The other option is directly approaching the dummy candidate, which is difficult and risky.
The first option is infinitely more suitable because the coaching centres efficiently organise everything from procuring the dummy candidate to tampering with the admit cards. The price is high though, ranging from Rs 5 to 8 lakh.
The identity of the dummy is never revealed. When the deal is finalised the coaching centres start their individual inquiry into the candidate’s antecedents to rule out any police crackdown. Once the centre has done the checks, the candidate is asked to deposit 75 to 85 per cent of money. The remaining amount has to be paid after clearing the examination. After the payment is made candidates are asked to deposit their academic certificates to the centre to prevent non-payment of the balance payment.
The next step for the aspirant is to deposit the exam admit card with the centre. There the photographed is tampered with and the suitable dummy examinee is found. With a nationwide network, dummies are flown in from different cities, depending on their similarity in looks with that of the candidate. The coaching centre provides for travel and other expenses of the dummy candidate. With the job complete, the dummy gets cut money varying from Rs 60,000 to Rs one lakh depending on the profile of the examination. Investigators say that there have been cases where a group of such candidates have sat in a single room. Generally, this happens in the case of high-profile examinations.
Though the racket that has been busted concentrated on the medical exams, teachers in engineering colleges feel a similar racket might be working for the engineering exams also. “Just because no one has been caught yet, does not mean there is no such engineering racket. There are other all-India entrance exams such as CAT and IITJEE that take place with minimum fuss. If there is a loophole in our system, we can adopt their model,” said a professor of Jadavpur University’s engineering department.
Many in the academic circles also do not rule out leaking of JEE question papers. Many of the impersonators are previous pass-outs. But, the WBJEE revamped its syllabus last year after West Bengal Board of Higher Secondary Education updated its syllabus. The question being raised is how are these former students so comfortable with the new syllabus. “The only way it can occur is if the question paper is leaked or there is someone who informs the racket about the questions,” said a principal of a private engineering college.
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