Hyd police arrest officials for cloning fingerprints to fake attendance

The Associate Professor of Nova Engineering College has been arrested for designing a technique of cloning fingerprints from the internet to avoid biometric attendance.
Hyd police arrest officials for cloning fingerprints to fake attendance
Hyd police arrest officials for cloning fingerprints to fake attendance
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The East Zone Task Force police, Hyderabad arrested Vice-Principal of Vivekananda Group of Institutions, along with an associate professor for selling cloned fingerprints of faculty members of various educational institutions to cheat and bypass the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University (JNTU) biometric attendance system and also to evade the mandatory prerequisite requirement of 1:15 faculty-student ratio in colleges.

The Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University has put in place the online biometric attendance system, which is also linked with Aadhaar card. As per norms, the JNTU should also have mandatorily 1 lecturer for 15 students, which several engineering colleges including Vivekananda Group of Institutions don’t abide by. Police are probing the involvement of other colleges too.

The police told TOI, “To meet the norm, college managements employ limited full-time faculty, while ‘ghost’ faculty (nonworking) would be on their rolls. The ‘ghost’ faculty would be paid 2,000-3,000 per month and make an appearance only when there would be inspections by JNTU experts or other competent authorities.”

The brain behind this cloning technique was associate professor of Nova Engineering College B Ramakrishna, who is also pursuing his PhD. “To overcome the issue of marking biometric attendance Ramakrishna designed a technique of cloning fingerprints from the internet to fudge attendance,” police said.

“They collect fingerprints of graduates and clone them to mark their attendance on the JNTU server. We are also probing if there is any other college involved,” said Chaitanya Kumar, Additional DCP, Task Force.

The police have seized the cloning machine, cloned prints, glue and other materials including Rs 3 lakh from their possession. According to Hyderabad Commissioner, Anjani Kumar Yadav, the prime accused, secretary of Vivekananda Group of Institutions, Gopal Reddy is absconding, while the Vice Principal, Sudarshan Reddy, associate professor B Ramakrishna and another accused, P Sriram have been arrested.  
According to police, the fraud was busted after Sudarshan Reddy, VP of Vivekananda group, sought the biometrics for five faculty members from Ramakrishna. When Ramakrishna returned with the cloned fingerprints, they were arrested.
 

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