Forged educational certificates could soon be a thing of the past. The government seeks to establish and maintain, in electronic format, the database of all academic certificates issued by universities, Central and state school boards. After a delay of over a year, Union human resource development ministry is likely to bring the National Academic Depository (NAD) Bill 2011, before the Union Cabinet soon.
This paper had first reported in July 2010 that the HRD ministry was planning to establish a National Depository for storage of academic certificates. The ministry has also decided to electronically mark these digitised certificates in case an educational loan is secured by the respective student. Sources stated that the step has been taken in an effort to ensure that the subsidised education loan scheme of the HRD ministry is a success. Several banks had lobbied for e-marking of these certificates be built into the scheme to make the recovery of loans easier.
Official sources stated that the national depository will ensure that circulation of fake degree and diploma certificates will be checked in the country. “This legislation will put in place a fool-proof verification process for the employers. All school boards, universities and certificate issuing institutions in the country can have direct linkages to the depository where the certificates will 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 on-line 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. Adequate system of safeguards for storage, access and retrieval of records will be ensured for confidentiality, fidelity and authenticity, sources added.
Under the provisions of the proposed law, if any academic institution fails to discharge its duty or contravenes the provisions of the Act they will be liable for penalty up to `5 lakhs. For offences like hacking into the national educational certificate database, the offenders will be punishable under the provisions of the IT Act, 2000.