Allegations Raised Regarding Crores Of Malpractice In CET Tender Process; Complaint Filed To Deputy Chief Minister And Cyber Cell
Mumbai, 9th November 2022: The State Common Entrance Examination Cell (CET) awarded work contracts to old private companies at increased rates without conducting the tender process for the examinations conducted to perform the admission process of various courses. Also, a complaint has been lodged with Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Cyber Cell alleging that the companies have sold students’ information and misappropriated crores in the process.
CET conducts the process with a total of twenty-two entrance exams for undergraduate and postgraduate courses under the departments of Technical Education, Higher Education, Medical Education, Agriculture etc. The tender process advertisement was published on March 26, 2021, to conduct an online examination for admission for the academic year 2021-22.
After that four companies participated in this process. However, the tenders were extended three times in a row to allow a particular company to participate in the tender process. Last year’s admission process was conducted with the help of other companies after the concerned company participated in the tender process.
The amount of this contract was approximately Rs 46 crores. For this year’s academic year 2022-23, without conducting the tender process, contracts worth around Rs 53 crore were awarded to the same companies again in June at an increased rate of five per cent. After that, all five companies charged Rs 283 to Rs 424 per student for conducting the admission process.
All these additional burdens of Rs 27 crore fell on CET Cell. Rs 15 to Rs 20 crores is expected to be spent to carry out this entire entry process and the contract was awarded to a particular company at an increased rate. In that too, companies gave work to other companies by ‘subtending’.
Therefore, there is an allegation of misappropriation of around 50 crores in this process on the former member of Savitribai Phule Pune University’s (SPPU) Prof Dhananjay Kulkarni.
The disruption of the academic year due to the tender process of CET Cell, the admission process will continue till December. So students will lose one session. Kulkarni demanded an inquiry into the entire tender process of CET Cell. It is also alleged that the private company sold the data of around 10 lakh students registered for the CET exams.
Students upload complete information and documents along with the application form for examination. But the companies made money by selling this confidential information.
Kulkarni also said that a complaint of this kind has been filed with the Mumbai Cyber Cell. Meanwhile, the Commissioner of CET Cell, Mahendra Varbhuvan, was contacted in this regard through a mobile, short message, but he did not respond.
