Move to check impersonation of teachers

Updated on: Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Chennai: With some unscrupulous players in the field of self-financing technical education continuing to indulge in academic fraud by resorting to impersonation of teachers, authorities at the Anna University (Chennai) are speeding up plans to check the menace.

The issue of impersonation of faculty had come to light early this year, when an inspection team of the Anna University's affiliation department found that a Mathematics teacher of a school and a couple of software company employees were presented before it as qualified teachers at a private engineering college in suburban Chennai.

To ensure that unqualified men and women did not end up masquerading as technical teachers in other colleges, the university had then announced that it would create a database of teachers in all its 140-odd affiliated colleges. However, the scheme did not take off on time.

In the meantime, the menace has spread to deemed universities. A new deemed university in the north-western suburbs last month asked some of its final year students to sign as teachers ahead of an inspection. "Nearly 15 of us were asked to pose for a group photo along with our teachers. They took our signatures in the faculty book where we were shown as lecturers," alleged a student.

Another popular deemed university also showed some of its junior faculty members as professors during an inspection recently.

While it is difficult to regulate deemed universities, the rot in the engineering colleges is set to be stemmed.

"I have already instructed the director (affiliation) to start the process of issuing photo ID cards to faculty of affiliated colleges. Teachers will be summoned along with proof of their academic credentials and bio-data and individually photographed. We will maintain a database of teachers and update it when they switch jobs. No engineering college can recruit a serving faculty of another college unless they have a relieving order from their previous employer," Anna University (Chennai) vice chancellor P Mannar Jawahar told The Times of India. The database will be ready by end-October, he assured.

Move to check impersonation of teachers

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