CHENNAI: The state government will form a committee to investigate the alleged ghost faculty scam in a few private engineering colleges in the state. The committee is expected to be headed by the commissioner of Directorate of Technical Education (DoTE).
Sources in the higher education department said a professor from Anna University and a senior official from All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) will also be included in the committee, which is likely to be formed this week.
“We have completed the initial investigation and have found the need for a high-powered committee to conduct a detailed probe to recommend action. The higher education department will constitute the committee soon,” said university vice-chancellor R Velraj.
The committee will investigate how the private colleges, affiliated to Anna University, managed to have ghost faculty members on their payroll for years and how this fraud helped them to attract students to the institutions. The committee will suggest action against those found guilty. However, the biggest task for the university is to chalk out a foolproof strategy to check such duplication of faculty members by private engineering colleges in the future.
Till now, the university was checking the Aadhaar and PAN numbers of the faculty to check their authenticity. After the anti-graft NGO Arappor Iyakkam exposed the scam, the university used the organisation’s mechanism to identify ghost faculty members using their date of birth.
Though the NGO had alleged that over 224 colleges did the fraud and identified 353 ghost faculty, the university findings showed a lesser figure. “We have checked the database thoroughly and found that only 70 colleges, mostly tier II and tier III, are involved in such wrongdoings, while the number of ghost faculty members in multiple colleges is 211. To save some money, the colleges have shown fake faculty in their records while providing details of infrastructure to the university for affiliation renewal,” said a university official.
Meanwhile, the university has submitted a report comprising its initial findings to the AICTE, higher education department, and the governor, who is also the university chancellor. AICTE chairman TG Sitharam has also spoken to the V-C over phone.
“As the NGO had sent a complaint about the issue to AICTE, the chairman enquired about it with the university,” added the official.