CAT paper leak triggers crisis of confidence in IIMs, govt plays blame game

A little after 7 a.m. on Sunday, November 23, an insistent phone ring broke the early morning calm in Bakul Dholakia's red brick home on the sun-drenched campus of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. At the other end was Pankaj Kumar Singh, DIG of the Central Bureau of Investigation, Delhi.The Common Admission Test (CAT) paper had been leaked and he wanted to verify it with Dholakia. He did not know though that as director of the country's premier management institute, Dholakia has no control over the admission procedure- it is handled by CAT, which comprises the admission chairmen of the six IIMs. By the time the CBI managed to pin down the chairperson of the admissions committee, Vijay Sherry Chand, it was 8.15 a.m., just over two hours to go before an estimated 1.27 lakh students gathered in 147 centres across 26 cities to answer 150 questions and get one of the about 1,300 seats that could change their fortune. For a two-year fee of Rs 3 lakh, they would be ensured a starting salary of Rs 6 lakh a year. Not just that, they would forever bask in the glory of having walked through the portals of one of the finest ambassadors of global brand India. By the time students like 20-year-old K. Manu, who had spent over a year preparing for the exam, walked out of his Bangalore centre, the HRD Ministry had already broadcast the news over television screens at 12 noon without first checking it with the IIMs. The 2003 CAT examination was cancelled for the first time in the IIMs' 42-year history-it would be held again on February 15, causing students to reinvent the wheel.The chairman told the CBI what Dholakia had, that the system had been rendered so immune to tampering that only the assembled students could break open the two seals which held together the covering of the 35-page paper. At around 11, at a south Delhi public school, one such opened paper was handed over to the CBI.For those in the often cynical world of higher education in less media imploded times, it was a revisit to May 1997, when there was a leak in the joint entrance examination to the six prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology, and the test was cancelled. In a furious debate in Parliament, Prithviraj Chauhan and Ramesh Chennithala, both of the Congress, had smoke pouring out of their ears as they talked about how the "credibility of the IITs would be ruined locally and internationally". At that point, Chauhan found it "shocking that the paper leak occurred in Bihar and Lucknow". But the exams were quietly held again in July the same year, the CBI which was to investigate the case never submitted a report, and increasing globalisation made the larger question of IITs' credibility a non-issue. This time too the mastermind appears to have been from Bihar-Ranjit Singh alias Ranjit Don, a 33-year-old veteran of the cheating game who bought himself an MBBS degree from Darbhanga Medical College.The unravelling of his underground empire, which seems to cover entrance examinations to every professional institute (with rates ranging from Rs 10-15 lakh for the medical entrance exam conducted by the CBSE to Rs 4 lakh for the NDA exam), began on the night of November 22. The CBI picked him up along with three others from Hotel Shanti Palace in south-west Delhi-they also came across four candidates to whom copies of the question paper and answer sheets for the CAT examination had been shown for Rs 2-4 lakh each.The CBI then raided the Patna premises of five persons and laid bare a network that extended from Singh's home in Kankarbagh, Patna, to the house of his now absconding brother Shrawan Kumar Azad in Delhi's Vasant Kunj area. The HRD Ministry constituted a one man commission of inquiry-former comptroller and auditor-general V.K. Shunglu who is already reported to have told Delhi's School of Planning and Architecture Director A.K. Maitra toquit for not cooperating with his investigation.Shunglu's report is expected within a month by which time CAT candidates will have retraced their long and arduous trek. By then, the ministry will also have constituted an inquiry into the CBSE All India Medical Entrance Exam. Shunglu's probe is on but IIM directors are convinced there is only one weak link in their chain of command, the printing press in Mumbai. The semi-government Institute of Banking Personnel Selection (IBPS), based in a five-story building in Kandivli, north-western Mumbai, was apparently chosen for its expertise in printing question papers. It prints them for over 200 banking examinations for most of the public-sector banks and some private banks. The IBPS has been quick to deny the allegation. "We take the utmost precautions. Even I can't see question papers," says D.P. Sarda, director, IBPS, refusing to speculate on what could have caused the leak. When they hold the next exam, Prakash Apte, director, IIM, Bangalore, promises members of the faculty will be present at the printing press at the time of printing, packing and loading into trunks. They may even change the printing press. But all indications point to this copycat industry being widespread. THE BIG SPATIBPS building in MumbaiWHAT THE HRD MINISTRY WANTSBring parity between fees of management schools (IIMs charge up to Rs 1.5 lakh a year) and engineering institutes (IITs charge Rs 30,000 a year).Reverse the 1992 decision that IIMs should depend on the market for resources. Since 1999, the ministry has increased its budgetary support to the IITs to Rs 100 crore each and IIMs to Rs 14 crore. It also wants IIMs to sign the MoUs required by the Expenditure Reforms Commission.Move towards a common exam for all 930 management institutions in India as directed by the Supreme Court. According to AICTE, from 2005-6 onwards, the five major exams will be merged into one.Copycat:Ranjit Singh with his brothersWHAT THE IIMs SAYGiven the value addition that IIMs give and salaries students draw after graduation, the fees are not high. Also, student loans are available and poor students get scholarships from the IIMs' corpus fund.IIMs are not willing to sign the MoU on the ministry terms because it will force them to comply with ERC guidelines, killing the staff's initiative to do research. In any case, the incomes (Rs 100 crore each) of IIMs in Ahmedabad, Kolkata and Bangalore exceed their expenditures.If the HRD Ministry makes CAT the common examination system, as 52 affiliates have done, they will accept it; but not if the test is diluted. In its raids in Mumbai on Singh's home (he is director Ram Gopal Varma's neighbour) and pharmaceutical company, Radon Pharma-a Mumbai firm which takes its name from Ranjit Don, has a turnover of Rs 50 crore and pushes its products through the doctors Singh had "produced"-the CBI has seized many incriminating documents, which reveal his involvement in the All India Medical Entrance Examination, the Banking Recruitment Board and post-graduate medical examinations. Those arrested have reportedly confessed to engineering admissions for wards of many doctors, police officers and politicians in Patna. The CBI possesses a list of people who have paid Rs 10-15 lakh for admission into prestigious medical colleges across the country. Nalanda Police also suspect Singh's hand in the July 20, 2002, leak in the Bank Probationary Officers exam papers. Singh's meteoric rise reflects urban India's growing hunger for the comforts of a meritocracy without the labour involved. Seats are few and competition is tough-for instance, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi, offers only 45 seats but almost 40,000 take the exam. The desperation to succeed, by any means, is evident in what happened in Pune. After receiving a tip off on Saturday night that CAT papers were up for sale for Rs 3 lakh, an officer from the Pune Police pretended to be a candidate, complete with a photocopy of the admission card, and arrived, as instructed, at a cheap hotel at Baner Road. Here the police arrested three men and recovered a 15-page faxed copy of a question paper purporting to be the CAT paper. The students had been faxed the papers by a fourth accomplice, 23-year-old Chandan Singh in Delhi. Their modus operandi was simple- candidates had to stay all night with these students and would be given question papers and solutions to the CAT. This would ensure they wouldn't leak out the papers to other students. When the Pune Police matched the papers the next day they found hardly any similarities between the faxed questions and the real CAT papers. "But the students who planned to sell the papers were so confident they had the real one that they didn't ask for any money upfront," says Pune Police Commissioner A.N. Roy. Singh, on the other hand, never got it wrong. Born to a rich farmer as Kumar Suman Singh, he is said to have been involved in fraud very early in life. After completing his intermediate education from A.C. College, Nalanda, he got himself admitted to the Darbhanga Medical College and Hospital by producing a false age certificate. He has not looked back since. Married in March this year to Deepika, daughter of a marble trader from Kathauli village, Singh loved to show off, sometimes just by gifting degrees to relatives. It is said his family has at least 18 doctors. They include his absconding brother Azad (he secured degrees from Patna Medical College and Aligarh Medical College), his sister Sulochana (a student at Patna Medical College), and another relative Virender Kumar (a student at the Patna Dental College). He apparently began as early as 1990, when he was picked up by the police in Ranchi and sent to jail. By 1996, the Bihar Vigilance Bureau started an inquiry into the combined medical and dental admission test in the state and subsequently identified the real lynchpin, Dr Irshad Khan, who ran Z- Pharma, a pharmaceutical company in Mumbai, and is still missing. DGP D.P. Ojha, who was in the Vigilance Bureau for several years, says Singh is Khan's "puppet"-had the CBI not sat on Ojha's recommendation for a probe, Singh could have been reined in earlier.QUESTION MARKThe plethora of entrance examinations to professional institutions-where the supply of seats far outstrips the demand-is turning parents, students and teachers into nervous wrecks. Leakages like CAT do not help.MEDICAL COLLEGES 220 COLLEGES, 22,100 SEATS PER YEAR1. All India Institute of Medical Sciences has 45 undergraduate seats each year and 40,000 applicants.2. State level medical colleges, Delhi University, for example, conduct an entrance examination for three Delhi medical colleges. Only students domiciled in the state are eligible for admission.3. At least 15 per cent of seats of 90 government-run medical colleges in India, except Andhra Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir, are reserved for candidates passing CBSE's all-India medical entrance exam.ENGINEERING COLLEGES1,300 INSTITUTES WITH FOUR LAKH SEATS There are three major exams:1. Two rounds of joint engineering examinations for admission to the seven IITs, IT-Banaras Hindu University, and Dhanbad's Indian School of Mines.2. A CBSE-run All India Engineering Entrance Examination grants admission to the regional engineering colleges, National Institutes of Technology and deemed universities.3. State-level examinations for individual engineering colleges. MANAGEMENT SCHOOLS 930 INSTITUTES WITH 64,403 SEATSThere are five major exams:1.CAT (organised by IIMs)2. JMET (organised by IITs)3. MAT (conducted by All India Management Association)4. ATMA (conducted by the Association of Indian Management Schools)5. XAT (conducted by XLRI)Singh, who is ironically from Nalanda-the district that every educationist, including Joshi, loves to extol as having thefirst university in the world- is politically ambitious too. He is believed to be preparing to contest the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls from Nalanda, currently represented by Defence Minister George Fernandes. Founder of the Magadh Vikas Manch, Singh is said to have donated Rs 25 lakh to a party in the previous Lok Sabha polls. He has a palatial house in Bihar sharif, the district headquarters of Nalanda, where his four relatives live. As one knocks at the door, an eerie silence spills over. All that his sister-in-law will say is: "There is a conspiracy against Ranjit who has been brilliant from birth." Perhaps he is, in a twisted mercenary way. So twisted that he may just alter the course of one of the finest pillars of the Nehruvian vision for an independent India. IIM graduates may, and rightly so, consider themselves to be shining stars but for the ministry they appear to be grossly overpaid MBAs (GOMBAs). While speaking to INDIA TODAY, HRD Minister Murli Manohar Joshi hit out at the IIMs saying they have to be accountable. "The government gives them money," says Joshi. "We are not interfering in their academic autonomy. But parliamentarians ask us questions, not them." He went on to indicate that Shunglu's inquiry would extend to suggestions on how to "maintain the quality and excellency of these institutes. The question is of the credibility of these institutions. Now people can say that IIM admission is a game of money". Ever since he took charge of the ministry, Joshi has tried to reverse, or so he says, the "thoughtless commercialisation" of education. Ministry officials are clear about they need to do: Bring parity between fees of management schools (IIMs charge upto Rs 1.5 lakh a year) and engineering institutes (IITs charge Rs 30,000 a year).Reverse the 1992 decision that these institutions should depend on the market for their resources. Since 1998-99, the ministry has increased its budgetary support to the six IITs (with 4,000 seats) to Rs 100 crore each. In the three premier IIMs (with about 700 seats), it has raised the support to Rs 14 crore. The ministry wants the IIMs to sign MoUs as required by the Expenditure Reforms Commission (ERC). Move towards a common exam for all 930 management institutions in India as directed by the Supreme Court. Already for the 1,300 engineering institutions in the country, there are three entrance exams. To bring in greater uniformity in management institutes, a committee headed by All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) Chairman R. Natarajan has held a series of deliberations in the past two years which has said the number of admission tests be limited for the current year and that from 2005-6 onwards, all the five major examinations (CAT, JMET, MAT, ATMA and XAT) be merged into one. Who will administer this will again be decided by the committee. Murli Manohar Joshi, Union HRD ministerThe IIMs will have none of this. On the issue of parity, Apte is very clear: "Given the kind of value addition IIMs are able to give and the kind of salaries students draw after graduation, the fees are not very high."Not just that. The IIMs are only too quick to dismiss the parity argument on the grounds that IITs are primarily undergraduate institutions unlike IIMs . As for not signing MoUs with the ministry, which will force them to comply with ERC guidelines, Dholakia says it will have several implications, one of which is to kill his staff's initiative.PRIZED BUYSBakul Dholakia, Director, IIM-AhmedabadEvery entrance exam has a price and Ranjit Singh knew it.Rs 10-15 lakh: All India Medical Entrance Exam paperRs 8-10 lakh: Engineering exam paperRs 8-10 lakh: MDAT paperRs 4-8 lakh: Bank probationary officers examRs 4 lakh: NDA examRs 3 lakh: UDC examRs 1.5-2 lakh: LDC examRs 5-10 lakh: Bihar Public Service Commission exam "For instance, the ERC allows faculty to travel abroad to present papers only once in three years. If I can finance it on my own, why should I not want my staff's research to be disseminated?" In any case, he points out, the incomes (Rs 100 crore each) of IIMs in Ahmedabad, Kolkata and Bangalore exceed their expenditures. There is no way they will accept the government diktat that their corpus fund be restricted to Rs 25 crore. On a common entrance test too, the IIMs are determined to have their way- only if the Government decides to accept CAT as the common examination system, just as 52 affiliates have done, will they fall in line. Says Apte: "The superiority of CAT has been established. The only problem is how to offer it several times a year, keeping the varying schedules of management institutes in mind." Some are more vocal. Trilochan Sastry, a professor at IIM, Bangalore, minces no words: "In the era of liberalisation, the Government wants control. What could be more ironic?"- with Shyamlal Yadav, Sandeep Unnithan, Supriya Bezbaruah and Sayantan ChakravartyPublished By: AtMigration Published On: Dec 8, 2003 00:00 IST--- ENDS ---

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CAT paper leak triggers crisis of confidence in IIMs, govt plays blame game

The leakage of the Common Admission Test triggers a crisis of confidence in the IIMs even as the Government plays the blame game and jostles for control.

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