Govt for bill to check forged education certificates
Forged educational certificates could soon be a thing of the past. The government is likely to bring the National Academic Depository (NAD) Bill 2010, before the Union Cabinet soon. The law aims to establish and maintain, in electronic format, the database of all academic certificates issued by universities and Central and state school boards.
Official sources stated that the Union human resource development ministry is likely to introduce the bill in the Monsoon Session which commences from Monday.
Sources stated that the creation of a depository will ensure that circulation of fake degree and diploma certificates will be checked. “The idea is to check forged certificate and have foolproof verification process for the employers. Under this initiative, the school boards, universities and certificate-issuing institutions can have direct linkages to the depository. The certificates could be stored in a DMAT format,” sources added.
Any person, employer or institution requiring a copy of an educational certificate will have the facility of online access or may obtain physical copy of the authenticated academic award from the NAD.
The proposed law also aims to create an agency for having a database of academic degrees of school and university passouts. “This agency will adopt adequate system of safeguards for storage, access and retrieval of records while ensuring its confidentiality, fidelity and authenticity,” sources stated.
The draft law says that if any academic institution fails to discharge its duty or contravenes the provisions of the act will be liable for penalty up to Rs 5 lakh. For offences like hacking into the national educational certificate database, the offenders will be punishable under the provisions of the IT Act, 2000.
In an effort to ensure that the subsidised education loan scheme of the HRD ministry is a success these digitised certificates will be marked mentioning about the outstanding loan amount. This paper had first reported last month that the step had been initiated after bankers demanded that an in-built system be developed to make the recovery of loans more easier.
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