IIT-Kharagpur chairman Shiv Nadar's company, HCl, has made a move that not only flouts laid down norms but also deals a blow to the Government’s single entrance concept, which among others strives to diminish the influence of coaching centres on engineering aspirants.
Nadar’s HCl learning has collaborated with Resonance¸ a coaching centre for IIT aspirants at Kota in Rajasthan, to form HCl Xcelerate to impart coaching to engineering aspirants.
Ethically, while holding a public office neither Nadar nor his company is supposed to fund or collaborate for a JEE coaching institute, sources said adding that this is the basis of a complaint by an IIT professor to President Pranab Mukherjee, who is Visitor of the IITs, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, HRD Ministry and Central Vigilance Commission (CVC).
The IIT Patna Board of Governors (BoG) is also headed by other HCl co-founder Ajai Chowdhry while another former honcho of the company Arjun Malhotra is an alumnus of the institute.
As a matter of fact, no IIT faculty or staff member can have any interaction with any coaching institute, on ethical grounds. Already, a complaint with regard to faculty-coaching centre nexus is pending with the CVC since July 2011.
In JEE 2011, IIT-Roorkee faculty were caught helping their own wards at the Bhatinda centre. In the past, the instance of 20 students getting selected from a single room of a JEE Centre in Kota too raised eyebrows as this could not have been possible without the connivance of JEE administrators. This led to cancellation
of Kota as JEE examination centre.
While the results of Joint Engineering Entrance (JEE-Mains) which is the first step towards engineering admission was announced last week, the entrance test for admission towards various IITs in the form of JEE (Advanced) is scheduled later this month. The examination would be taken by candidates falling under the normalisation of top 20 percentile in Class 12 results.
Sources alleged that Nadar, being overall in-charge of governing IIT-KGP, may have full access to information about the people associated with entrance examination processes like setting and printing of question papers, the private agencies involved in the evaluation of ORS scripts, who is the custodian of the whole dataset in the computer, etc.
In a meeting of the IIT Council in July 2012 followed by HRD Minister Kapil Sibal's single entrance test for all the engineering institutes across country, the council took the decision in favour of use of Class 12 percentile performance. The crucial meeting was attended by both HCl honchos, including Nadar.
Being IIT Council members, the HCl honchos are having conflicts of interests over the decisions of their HCl's business interest. The Central Information Commission (CIC) has directed IIT Kharagpur to disclose its 'deal' with HCl for the past five years.
HCl is a computer, network and peripherals supplier to IIT-KGP since the company's inception in 1976. The business for HCl from IIT-KGP has increased manifold, from Rs 2 crore in 2009-10 to Rs 16 crore in 2010-11 and Rs 14 crore in 2011-12.