It took Mumbai police two and a half years to arrest the director and and two other officials of a b-school in Mumbai for offering fake degrees. The arrests were made on August 6, 2011 but the police complaint was filed way back on March 11, 2009. The reason it took so long according to the police was “because Sikkim is so far away.”

The school in question is the International Business School of Management (IBSM), located at Ballard Estate, Mumbai. According to the complaint, the school officials allegedly lured students by promising degrees affiliated to EIILM University in Sikkim, when it did not have any such affiliation. Since Sikkim is so far away it took a long time to investigate the case. It takes time to get information from all the way there, said a police officer of the Economic Offences Wing (EOW), the police unit that handled this case.

The three arrested by the police included Surbhi Roshan (director of IBSM), 43, Jarnail Bhuttar, 54 and Vasant Jadhav, 38, under Sections 420 (cheating) and 34 (acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention). Police also recovered around Rs 27,41,040 from two bank accounts they seized.

The complaint was initially filed by a few students of IBSM at the nearby MRA Marg police station. Seeking information through Right to Information Act, they learned that the b-school had no connection whatsoever with EIILM University Sikkim. The MRA Marg police station registered the complaint, investigated the matter for a few days and handed over the case to the EOW, a specialised department that deals with such cases. The Department of Technical Education (DTE) Mumbai, in the meanwhile also ordered closure of the b-school after studying the complaint made at the police station.

The location

If not anything, the location of IBSM’s main branch on Kumtha Street at Ballard Estate should have been cue enough to students, that something was amiss. Located on the ground floor of a one-storied building, in one of the many narrow gullies of Ballard Estate, the school had a thriving ‘restaurant and bar’ bang opposite. The manager of the bar seemed to be the only person who remembered IBSM. Han, yahaan pe college hota tha. Kuchh MBA jaisa sikhatha tha. Par police aake bandh kiya kuchh do saal ho gaye, tabse band hi hai. (Yes, there was a college here before, probably teaching MBA. But the police came and closed down the school some two years ago. It’s been closed ever since).

The manager recalled seeing students come to the school during the day “but it has become real quiet now.” True to his words, the locked iron gate of IBSM looks grim and out of place on the street which is perpetually noisy and teeming with people. There is no IBSM board but the iron gate looks odd in an otherwise busy building, giving the impression that life stopped there suddenly. Kumtha street is a one way but still used by vehicles to cross between two arterial road situated on either side of Kumtha street. The location of the b-school and its size (difficult to fathom from outside but would not be more than a few classrooms inside) should have pushed the students to think twice before enrolling.

Though narrow, the gully is jammed with parked vehicles and chances are that when students got out of the main door, they would have had to maneouver their way through the parked cars and bikes to get to the mail road.

Modus Operandi

According to the police, IBSM used to call students and invite them to join the college. Not a rare practise in India though, especially with schools lower in the spectrum, but the ‘Rs 3 lakhs fees only’ bait for the two-year MBA course worked as perfect enticement. At least 200 students were roped in in this fashion for a couple of years, said the police. “However, it was only after one of the students got a little suspicious and filed an RTI, that he found out that the information about affiliation with EIILM University was wrong. He found that the course offered by IBSM was not recognised either by the UGC or by the Assistant Director All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), said the police officer.

EIILM University, Sikkim

Officials at EILM Univeristy in Sikkim also told PaGaLGuY that students should have been more careful before believing any of the school’s promises. If a school says that a degree is being offered by a particular university, the student should check for papers and confirm, said an official from EIILM Univeristy. There will be a certificate which the b-school can show for such kind of affiliations, the EIILM official added.

If not the certificate, all that the students had to do was go on the Internet and verify. They would have at least come to know that EIILM University does not provide degrees outside of Sikkim, leave along IBSM all the way in Mumbai.

It was difficult to speak to students as many had gone their way after the school shut. But from a couple of education forums on the Internet it was obvious that while in business, IBSM had quite a few takers. There were students who had posted on different forums and asked questions on the admission criteria and cutoffs for IBSM. There was confusion though between students since another b-school in Nagpur also went with the same acronym IBSM.

Arrested Director says

Apparently, the IBSM director who is now in judicial custody has explained that her motives were not to fool the students. She told police during the investigation that she had applied for an affiliation to Sikkim University. The approval was taking time to come. And when the approval did not come, we even stopped taking classes. We did not fake the degree, it is just that the permission did not come in time, she is believed to have said.

When PaGaLGuY visited the premises, there was obviously no one to talk to, phone calls to some numbers listed on the website also went unanswered. A court case filed (in 2009) by the same bunch of students who filed the police complaint, ensured that at least some students got their fees back over the last two years. The EOW officers also seized two of IBSM’s accounts, one at Axis Bank and one at ICICI Bank, and recovered around Rs 27,41,040. The accused also transferred a lot of money from their ICICI bank account to various banks in India, said the EOW police officer.

The attitude

It’s no wonder that the case took two years to make its first arrests. The attitude of the police and the Department of Technical Education (DTE) authorities can make anyone cringe. The MRA Marg police station flatly refused to accept that the case was filed at its police station. The officials there were convinced that PaGaLGuY had made a mistake with the name of the police station. Even after explaining that by logic, Ballard Estate came under its jurisdiction (since it is closeby), they refused to relent. The just directed this correspondent to the EOW, a few blocks away.

The EOW is made up of different units, each unit handling different type of cases. Officers in every unit told PaGaLGuY that they had never heard of the case and there must have been some mistake, even as arrests were being made only two days ago. Finally, an officer from EOW Unit 4 admitted that he had handled the case (the same person who had given the earlier excuse of ” Sikkim being far away.”) He further justified the delay, Besides people changed numbers and changed their location too. It took time for us to track everybody down. Even students changed their addresses and numbers. Many have left Mumbai too. And we have so many cases at the same time that it is difficult to speed up cases.”

The DTE was as unhelpful. Officials there just refused to speak on the issue. The DTE Director said that the information could be parted with only after August 16. The deputy director just stood up and said that he will not speak.

With such kind of an attitude, blunders in higher education are just waiting to happen. With students foolish enough not to check on the credentials of the institute to police officials not even remembering the case, forget dragging its feet over the case, to stubborn DTE officials, disasters of this nature can strike all the time.