A private university in Rajasthan issued a total of 43,409 forged degrees since 2013 at around 19 states including Rajasthan and also a neighbouring foreign country Nepal, said an official from the state's special operation group familiar with the matter.
“The Churu-based Om Prakash Jogender Singh (OPJS) University was started in 2013, since when they issued such a huge bulk of fake certificates to the students in several different states and also a neighbouring country. It was also found that most of them have later also secured jobs in the governments of the concerned states and country based on fake certificates,” said the Additional Director General of Police (ADGP) of SOG VK Singh.
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He also added that the SOG has already arrested the owner of OPJS University Jogender Singh Dalal along with the former chairperson Sarita Karwasra and the former registrar Jitendra Yadav (who is also currently the owner of two other private universities in Rajasthan and Gujarat) in the case on July 5.
Though no state-wise data on the classification of the number of degrees by the OPJS owners was immediately available, the Deputy Inspector General (DIG) of the SOG Paris Deshmukh stated that the maximum degrees were issued to the people in Rajasthan, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Panjab, Gujarat, Maharashtra, and West Bengal.
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Meanwhile, a significant amount of degrees were also issued to the students in Delhi, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Telangana, Jammu and Kashmir, Uttarakhand, and also in Nepal.
Modus Operandi
According to the DIG, the incident came to the fore after the degrees of 1,300 applicants who appeared for the Physical Training Instructor (PTI) exam 2022 were found fake during a verification process by the exam controlling agency in the state on April 8, 2024.
“All of them were issued by the OPJS university. We had meanwhile also received a slew of complaints through our SOG helpline number against OPJS regarding the same issue,” he said.
During the investigation, the SOG found that the university used to issue fake certificates on backdate and also flouted several norms of the university-accreditation guidelines. “For example, they were not authorised to run any agriculture course but were awarded a total of 930 degrees. Despite having only 28 staff, they claimed across their websites that they have been running more than 23 courses even at the Masters and Ph.D level,” Deshmukh added.
He also noted that the OPJS was also debarred from enrolling scholars in its PhD programmes by UGC in 2023. “The decision was made after the university failed to submit the requisite data concerning the PhD degrees given in 2018,” the officer said.
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As per the data provided by the SOG, the OPJS has issued a maximum of 8861 degrees for engineering courses followed by 7826 for education courses, 6188 for medical courses, 5397 for several arts subjects, and 3167 for Pharmacy courses.
“It was also found that they were not even approved such amount of intakes in these courses but issued degrees which were seized by SOG. They used to act as a printing press that provided degrees from their university at any part of the country in exchange for money,” said Deshmukh.
The middlemen of the OPJS university across the country used to supply candidates seeking degrees for specific subjects and levels in exchange for about 10% to 15% commission, the SOG probe revealed. “The candidates' payments used to be determined based on the value of a subject in the market and also the level of the required degree. A range of 50,000 to 800,000 transactions were made between the candidate and OPJS owners,” said Deshmukh.
He further added: “Prima facie, the entire inter-state racket used to be operated through these bunch of middlemen who used to work for several private universities in those states along with OPJS. We suspect that those private universities in these 19 states and Nepal also issue fake certificates in local areas. The OPJS owners targeted the middlemen of those universities in order to lead the market of the fake certificates by dismantling the competitors.”
The middlemen used to either visit the owners to collect a physical copy of the certificates or otherwise receive it on WhatsApp and forward it to the concerned candidates.
the mission that broke the racket
Following the PTI-2022 verification incident, the SOG conducted a decoy operation in April and got hold of a middleman, Pradeep Sharma, in Churu who used to work for both the OPJS University and the Uttarakhand-based private institution Himalayan Garhwal University.
During the interrogation of Sharma, the names of six more middlemen also came to the fore- all of whom were arrested by May. “Meanwhile, we also found conclusive evidence against Dalal, Karwasra, and Yadav and arrested them on July 5.”
The DIG stated that Dalal was also arrested in 2018 by the Haryana police in connection to a scholarship scam in the state. “Before opening the OPJS in 2013, he was also part of a Rohtak-based academy IPS college and education research and had probably issued a few such fake certificates there too which are under investigation,” Deshmukh said.
On the other hand, Yadav, despite joining OPJS in 2015 without any suspicious past criminal record, built a strong network in the fake-certificate market in India and owned two other universities- Sunrise University in Rajasthan's Alwar and MK University in Gujarat's Patan to expand the business on his own, said SOG officials.
“Both Dalal and Yadav were under process to open two more universities- Vedic University in Jaipur and Jeed University in Bundi- an approval of which is yet pending with the Rajasthan Higher Education Department,” said Deshmukh.
The actions and the way forward
Considering the dubious role of the owners as per SOG's report, the state higher education department had meanwhile on June 24 ordered to halt all the new admission process in the university.
“We have also asked them to launch an investigation on the candidates of the 43,909 candidates who were issued a certificate by the OPJS to check whether all of them are fake. They will now verify the date of fees submission and admission of those candidates,” said Deshmukh.
The Department of Personnel (DoP) had also issued another order across all the departments in the Rajasthan government on June 6 to verify the degrees of all the employees joined the government in the last five years, said official familiar with the matter.
“We have also contacted the administration of the 19 states and Nepal where the OPJS issued fake certificates. A formal letter will soon be sent to all these states to verify the degrees of the employees working in their concerned state government as well,” said Deshmukh.
The SOG officials, meanwhile also stated that around 15 to 16 more private universities are also under the agency's lens regarding the fake certificate matter.
“We have also received three independent complaints in which it was found that the candidates with an OPJS degree had also impersonated or involved in the massive paper-leak gang to qualify several recruitment examinations in Rajasthan. A probe is underway against them too,” the DIG said.
