Academicians of repute have sounded an alarm and asked the Education Ministry to order an audit to countercheck and verify the educational and academic qualifications of teachers working in professional colleges. This follows Saturday’s arrest by the Chennai Police of a fake professor from an engineering college near Chennai who impersonated for three years as a scholar in power systems and taught the students here.
“Prof Ravi Kumar Reddy” was a ‘darling’ of the students of Saveetha Engineering College near Chennai. He rubbed shoulders with some of the best teachers and taught his students about advanced power systems, his area of specialisation. Nobody doubted his calibre as he had a PhD from Indian Institute of Science Bangalore in advanced power systems.
Prof Reddy joined as a faculty in Saveetha Engineering College in 2012. Students who sat through his lecture classes were amazed by his articulation. He had a photographic memory and recalled even the page and paragraph details of reference books.
But someone in the faculty smelled a rat somewhere and a probe to know more about him took them to the website of the IISc, Bangalore, where to their shock, they came across the real Dr Ravi Kumar Reddy who had the same curriculum vitae as that of the Prof Reddy in Saveetha College. The only difference was in the photographs. They alerted the police and the findings shook the educational establishment in Chennai.
The “articulate teacher” who stole the hearts of students posing as Prof Reddy was found to be Ashok Kumar Choudhury (35), a Class VIII dropout from Guntur in Andhra Pradesh. The impersonator who had a passion for studies was working in a photocopy shop in his hometown. His passion for engineering began when students from a nearby engineering college brought text books for photo copying. Choudhury made extra copies of such books and devoured whatever was printed in the books.
Over a period of time he became an expert in forgery and succeeded in getting some counterfeit BE, ME and MBA degrees. He changed his name to Ravi Kumar Reddy since the PhD degree was in that name. For a while he worked in various colleges and engineering colleges before landing up in Saveetha as a faculty with a take home pay of Rs 1.2 lakh per month.
“The cat would have been out of the bag had the fake Professor been interviewed properly at the time of his appointment. This could be one of the reasons behind the poor employability of engineering graduates. God only knows how many more such teachers are out there in the open teaching our future engineers,” Prof SP Thyagarajan, Professor of Eminence and Dean (Research), Sri Ramachandra University told The Pioneer.
Prof Thyagarajn, himself a former vice-chancellor of Madras University, said people like Ashok Choudhury take people for a ride because the powers that be fail to ensure the quality and authenticity of faculties they recruit. “There is a global on-line degree verification system originated from IIT Madras. Institutions can become members of this system. Digital copies of degrees awarded by universities go into the server and could be counterchecked by any of the member institutions,” explained Prof Thyagarajan.
Interestingly, last September saw Chennai Police arresting Gowthaman, a 57-year-old office assistant working with the Tamil Nadu State Council for Higher Education and his son logesh (32), who were engaged in the production of counterfeit degree certificates and mark lists in various branches of science and engineering. They charged Rs 15,000 for a SSlC /degree certificate while engineering degrees were sold for Rs 30,000.