Bengaluru: Criminal cases booked against 249 guest lecturers who submitted fake PhD certificates
The Collegiate Education Department has ordered the registration of criminal cases against 249 teachers who got placed as guest faculties in government first grade colleges
The Collegiate Education Department has ordered the registration of criminal cases against 249 teachers who got placed as guest faculties in government first grade colleges by submitting fake/invalid PhD certificates in the year 2025-26. Even as the recruitment process for guest lecturers in these colleges for the year 2026-27 is under way, all the tainted candidates have been blacklisted and excluded from the process. An order issued by the Commissioner, Collegiate Education, blacklists these candidates permanently for the years to come as well.
In 2025-26, the State government recruited about 10,000 guest faculties though an online counselling process in accordance with the workload required in the colleges, based on the information provided by the candidates. Principals of the respective colleges were instructed to compulsorily obtain authenticity reports for the PG marksheets, Eligibility Test (NET), Karnataka State Eligibility Test (K-SET), PhD, MPhil, and Kalyana Karnataka certificates, which were submitted by the selected candidates, from the universities/institutions concerned as a one-time procedure. A Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) was issued for the same.
As per this SOP, the certificates of the candidates were verified and if they were found to be “fake” or “invalid”, a committee headed by the principal was instructed to release the tainted guest lecturers from service and upload the report on the Education Management Information System (EMIS) portal of the department. Only if the guest lecturers objected to the decision of the college-level committee, such cases were instructed to be transferred to the department’s head office along with all the relevant documents for further investigation.
All the academic documents of the guest lecturers have been reviewed by committees headed by senior officers at the college level and the head office level, and a total of 249 people have been caught giving fake PhD certificates, prompting the department to fire and blacklist them. Criminal cases will also be booked against them as they have committed a fraud by providing false information/documents to the government.
The BriefWire