MEERUT: Meerut’s Chaudhary Charan Singh University (CCSU) on Thursday suspended its two employees and set up a probe against two assistant registrars after its ambitious plan to courier over 40,000 degrees directly to students’ home fell flat due to wrong and fictitious addresses recorded by the staffers.
It also comes against the backdrop of a petition in the Allahabad high court alleging scam. The petition says that there was a government post office on the premises of the university, but the authorities took the service of a private and little known courier firm.
Soon after it surfaced that wrong addresses of students were fed in the system -- in some cases they were ‘abcdefgh’-- and most of the degrees were coming back to the varsity, a probe was set up.
After the three-member probe panel submitted its report highlighting lapses, the university took the action. Departmental inquiry was set up against assistant registrars Vikas Kumar and Kamal Krishna. While Neeraj Kumar, chief assistant officer in accounts section, and Rajeev Pal, chief assistant officer in degree section, have been suspended.
Last year, in the midst of the pandemic, the university had decided to mail all the degrees directly to the residence of students to save them the hassle. The initiative was advertised as “one-of-its-own-kind in Uttar Pradesh". A sum of Rs 90lakh was also sanctioned for it.
Later, the courier agency said that over 40,000 degrees of the academic year 2017 and 2019 came back from the given postal addresses as “the place did not exist, or no such student with the given name was found at the address.”
Smelling a scam, a social activist, Abhishek Som, filed the petition in the court, which has now asked the UP government to file a response. The next hearing has been fixed for August 24.
“No courier agency guarantees delivery to villages. Then how come the university trusted a private agency to handle such a massive task of delivering degrees to the interiors of the rural areas across UP? Why the services of government agencies like India Post, which has impeccable credibility, was not taken which would have charged much lesser amount than the private agency which has not even been able to give details of tracking ID to the university,” petitioner Som said.
“Wrong addresses are just the tip of the iceberg. It is actually a scam in which lakhs of rupees were doled out without checking parameters or delivery mechanism. Now, we will see what the university says in the court,” Som said.
Meanwhile, the university is in damage control mode.
Registrar of CCSU, Dhirendra Singh, said, “We had immediately set up a probe committee in this regard. We have suspended two CCSU officials with immediate effect as the probe found dereliction in duty on their part. Besides, two assistant registrars have also been put under departmental inquiry. We have also terminated the contract of the courier agency and the remaining payment has also been withheld.”
