IIT-K professor runs fake institute

Kharagpur (West Bengal) : Academicians and students in this industrial town received a shock after hearing that a senior professor of the Indian Insititute of Technology, Kharagpur, was under police investigation for allegedly using the IIT campus and brand to run an institute, whose courses and diplomas had no legitimacy.

The report published in Tuesday’s newspapers said the scam was perhaps the biggest to hit India’s top engineering school with reports that aerospace engineering professor Amit Kumar Ghosh lured students into joining the unrecognized institute.

Police started an investigation after many students had alleged about the institute run by Ghosh.

The institute, which has received many queries from parents of students as well as from the police, has not come out with any official version on the issue.

The students in their letter to IIT Kharagpur Director, Damodar Acharya, have alleged that Ghosh has been running the Institute of Electrical Engineers (IEE) calling himself its president.

He even conducted their admission tests in his IIT office with each aspirant allegedly being charged a fee of Rs 27,000 for the course.

Ghosh, who headed the IIT Kharagpur aerospace department till August this year, was also the chief vigilance officer (CVO) of the IIT till recently.

“We believed the institute was genuine because of the association of Professor Ghosh with it,” says the complaint letter signed by 22 students. “We hope you will take strong action against Professor Ghosh and force him to pay us suitable compensation.”