Criminal cases in seat blocking discrepancies soon: Minister

Higher Education Minister MC Sudhakar on Friday confirmed the “seat blocking” irregularities in relation to engineering college seats under the Karnataka Common Entrance Test (KCET), adding that criminal cases would be filed soon. He said that the irregularities had taken place in the online counseling process and around 2,300 students had been identified and sent show-cause notices, adding that Internet Protocol (IP) addresses were being tracked. Sudhakar said that they were still in the process of assessing the matter and found that similar cases had taken place in the previous academic year to a lesser extent. “So when you're entering online, you have to go through some system and work, be it laptop or a desktop, or some cyber centre, wherever it is, where you have to enter there.

So, each one will have an IP address. So we have zeroed down on the IP address. There are 10 or 12 students, whose option entries were done within the same IP address. So this is what we are getting into. How it can be done. And now, we have to investigate the whole thing. So, now we're discussing and we are planning to probably file a criminal case against this,” Sudhakar said.

Cyber-crime cops or someone else? The minister said he couldn’t confirm whether a criminal case would be pursued by the cyber-crime police or some other agency. “In the recently concluded seat allotment through KEA (Karnataka Examination Authority), we have found some startling irregularities, not in terms of allotment. Rather some people have tried to hijack the system in a way. Very intelligently, they have tried to get the seats allotted in the last round, in the mop-up round and they have not reported to the colleges. What usually happens is the seats which are not filled in the last mop-up round go to the management and the management has to fill them as early before the stipulated deadline of the AICT (All India Council for Technical Education),” Sudhakar said. “Here, we had some sort of a doubt, why around 2,000 seats are not filled. There are two issues, one, is you have to download the receipt. Some people have downloaded the research but it has not been reported. So many seats have been filled up by the management. We have had to get the report from the management. So here we suspect some sort of a cartel and we try to investigate more and it came to our knowledge.

Some media friends also brought it to our notice and even our executive director also apprised me of the whole thing. So we have this, we decided to find out by giving a notice to the students we have been alerted to the seats as to why they have not joined (the colleges). So about 50 per cent of them have replied and the majority of them are saying that they have never entered options,” he added.