A thorough scrutiny of certificates by engineering admission authorities has thrown up a number of cases of bogus certificates being produced by students.
V. Rhymend Uthariaraj, Secretary, Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions 2010, said four cases of bogus nativity certificates were detected, with 41 suspect cases.
There were also cases of fake mark certificates and suspected cases of students producing old transfer certificates.
“On Monday, there were two cases in which students produced nativity certificates from the Ambattur tahsildar, which we found suspicious because of the dates. We have forwarded them to the Directorate of Technical Education for action. On Tuesday, we caught two more cases.”
The Commissioner of Revenue Administration has also been informed, he said. If the certificates were found to be bogus, the candidates would be barred from admissions for three years.
In another case, a candidate from Andhra Pradesh was asked to bring a certificate with the signature of the Village Administrative Officer (VAO). When officials questioned him about the authenticity of the signature, he started evading their queries and, finally, ran away leaving the certificate.
Dr. Uthariaraj said there could be many cases of students from other States occupying seats for Tamil Nadu students. Another means of cheating seemed to be old students producing school leaving certificates and taking up seats even when they were already in college. “This could be to block the seats in the counselling process and make students go in for management seats later,” Dr. Uthariaraj said.
In all, 496 students, who passed out between 2007 and 2009, had applied and two cases had been brought to light in which the students had produced only the school leaving certificate.
The authorities are now insisting that the candidates bring transfer certificates from their college.
Asked about similar incidents in previous years, Dr. Uthariaraj said such cases had not been detected. But, the scrutiny process had also been made more stringent this year after the first such cases were detected.
According to Directorate of Medical Education sources, so far ten applications for admissions were found to contain bogus mark sheets on screening.
