Vice-principal of Vivekananda Group of Institutions, Hayathnagar, is among the two others arrested by the city police for cloning the fingerprints and faking the biometric attendance of faculty.
On a tip-off, the Commissioner’s Task Force (East Zone) team led by Additional DCP S. Chaitanya Kumar and inspector K. Srinivas apprehended Bomma Ramakrishna (35), an associate professor from Narsapuram in West Godavari, P. Sriram Prasad (28) from Nizampet and Poreddy Sudarshan Reddy (35), vice-principal of Vivekananda Group of Institutions and a resident of Dammaiguda in ECIL.
Efforts are on to trace Gopal Reddy, secretary of Vivekananda Group of Institutions, who is at large. Hyderabad Commissioner of Police Anjani Kumar said that Prasad used to collect the fingerprint impressions of the faculty members of various colleges using glue gun and glue sticks and courier them to Ramakrishna, who lives in Narsapuram.
After receiving the fingerprint impressions, Ramakrishna, who is also a research scholar, used to clone them with chemicals and prepare a soft tissue and send them back to Prasad, he said and added that they charged ₹ 4,000 for each cloned fingerprint. Ramakrishna reportedly developed an android application on disaster management and was supposed to meet Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu. As per the norms of the JNTU, every engineering college must have one lecturer for every 15 students in 1:15 ratio. To implement it, JNTU officials and State government had launched biometric online attendance system for the proper attendance of faculty, which is linked to the JNTU server. “To bypass the role of hiring more faculties for their colleges, Ramakrishna started the cloning of fingerprints after learning it on Internet,” the commissioner said. Other engineering colleges are also involved in this fraud, police said.
