Education, Careers & Professional News
Raids On Pune Educational Institutions Yield Rs 5 cr
The on-going search and seizure operations by the investigations wing of the Income-Tax department into the capitation-donation- fee racket run by private educational institutes in Pune have unearthed unaccounted cash worth Rs 5 crore and incriminating documents.
Six Pune-based institutes were raided. The haul was so big that from one place alone. The I-T department seized Rs 3 crore in cash. The huge haul has created a storage problem for the department since all of it is in currency denominations of Rs 50 and Rs 100. The officials, however, declined to reveal the names of the institutes.
I-T officials have already stated that should the need arise; they would re-open cases filed six years ago. The raids, which began early morning on Wednesday, were the first-ever in the country conducted on educational institutions.
While no foreign exchange has been found as yet, I-T officials are believed to be keeping close tabs. Educational institutes in the city have attracted a huge following among NRIs, who are believed to have paid a premia as capitation fee, often in foreign exchange.
Officials said that some Trustees in Nagpur and Kolhapur have admitted that undeclared funds, raised through capitation fees, have been diverted into undeclared bank accounts.
The I-T department has sent a letter of inquiry even to the high-profile Symbiosis institutes. A raid on a middleman for a Symbiosis institute has yielded documents relating to admissions.
Meanwhile, the heads of some of the high-profile institutes denied any wrong-doing. The timing of the I-T raids could not have been better. It is admission time in Pune and this is when the money might have changed hands.
We wanted to catch them with concrete evidence, said SK Sharma, director-general, I-T (Investigations), at a hurriedly called conference on Wednesday.
The investigations wing of the I-T department raided six educational institutes in the city, which together run 36 colleges, and three in Nagpur. Branch offices, where the department had received information donations were being accepted were also raided. The department expects to take a week before it can go through documents recovered during the searches and investigations, to get an idea of the size of the racket.
The `educational barons` with their connection in the political circles run institutions offering professional courses. Medical colleges are believed to command the highest premium and the various quotas, management, NRI, etc., are believed to have been the route for discretionary allotment. Entrance tests conducted by these institutions are also believed to have been fixed and the results foregone, since parents have already paid amounts to ensure their wards get admission.