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| Photo Credit: PTI
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has registered a case against unknown nodal officers of 830 institutes and unknown bank officials for alleged fraud in the implementation of the Centre’s scholarship schemes for students of the minority communities, causing a loss of at least ₹144.33 crore from 2017-18 to 2021-22.
The case is based on a complaint lodged by the Ministry of Minority Affairs, which implements the scholarship schemes for pre/post-matric students and merit-cum-means scholarship for students of six minority communities, including Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists and Parsis. The scholarships are provided in more than 1.8 lakh institutions.
The funds are made available to the students via Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) through the Public Financial Management System.
According to the Ministry, following reports about embezzlement of funds under the scholarship schemes, it engaged the National Council of Applied Economic Research to carry out third-party evaluation. The Ministry also conducted an inquiry through the National Scholarship Portal by generating red flags on doubtful institutions/applicants.
A total of 1,572 institutes across 21 States were identified for evaluation based on red flags and of these, 830 were found either non-operational, fake or partially fake.
In its complaint, the Ministry said the scheme was launched in 2007-08 and at that time, funds were released to State governments and Union Territories for further disbursal of scholarships to students. It was converted into a Central sector scheme from 2014-15 and implemented on DBT mode with the help of software developed by the National Informatics Centre. In 2015-16, software developed by the Centre for Good Governance, Hyderabad, was used.
Finally, the NIC headquarters (Delhi) developed the National Scholarship Portal in 2016-17 and all the three scholarship schemes are now being implemented through the portal. There are three levels of verification of applications, involving Institute Nodal Officers (INOs), District Nodal Officers (DNOs) and State Nodal Officers (SNOs).
The Ministry suspects that the verifications were compromised at the level of INOs and DNOs and the scholarship money was siphoned off by them in collusion with the institute, banks and cyber cafe owners. The inquiry found that some institutions with enlisted beneficiaries were completely non-operational; in some operational schools, many ineligible beneficiaries were shown as students; and there were some non-existent schools.
Fake information
The fake beneficiaries and institutes were onboarded in the Ministry’s scholarships ecosystem in three ways: fake beneficiaries enrolled under fake institutes; fake beneficiaries enrolled under genuine institutes; and there were partially fake beneficiaries from genuine institutes.
Leveraging the Unified District Information System for Education (UDISE) information, fake INOs were registered on the portal by targeting the institutes which had UDISE details, but were not on the National Scholarship Portal. Applications were verified allegedly in collusion with DNOs, who did not conduct physical verification of institutes and beneficiaries.
Citing specific cases, the Ministry said that at Kanker in Chhattisgarh, one primary level government school only meant for Scheduled Tribe girl students, a significant number of “fake” students were getting scholarships under the post-matric scheme. In Bihar, the registered INOs were in fact cyber cafe owners, who probably made fake applications for coaching centre students.
Many schools from Madhya Pradesh reported that they were not recognised for classes above standard VIII, and yet a number of applications had been filed for higher classes. Schools also reported misuse of their user IDs and passwords. Some schools did not even have minority students enrolled in them.
In States like Gujarat, Meghalaya, Uttarakhand, Punjab and Maharashtra, schools had got upgraded from middle to secondary or higher secondary level. In such cases, schools are allotted multiple UDISE codes for different levels. On the scholarship portal, usually the first allotted code was displayed. This caused some discrepancies and led to loopholes. Then, there were delays in updating the school status on UDISE portal.
The Ministry suspected fraud linked to 225 institutes in Assam, followed by 162 in Karnataka, 154 in Uttar Pradesh and 99 in Rajasthan.