Aadhar Card Link to Check Medhabruti Scam

BHUBANESWAR: In a bid to check irregularities, the Higher Education Department will link Medhabruti Scholarships with Aadhar cards of students. IT major Accenture has been roped in for building a new system - State Resident Data Hub (SRDH) - to help in management of identity-related de-duplication of students and verification requests from Department. The decision comes in the wake of irregularities in issuance of Medhabruti scholarships recently. The Make of the applications submitted for the purpose were found to be fake. The e-Medhrabruti website, through which students apply for the scholarship online, is maintained by Odisha Knowledge Corporation Limited (OKCL). Sources said it has been decided that OKCL will provide data of students selected for Medhabruti scholarships from 2014-15 merit list for Khurda district to Accenture that will check the authenticity of the applications and students’ information based on their Aadhar details through SRDH. In case students do not have Aadhar cards, the Accenture team will develop a web service in collaboration with OKCL that would check the demographic data of students and send the same to SRDH which will validate it. For the purpose, voter ID card or any other Government ID proof has to be submitted by students. Higher Education Minister Pradeep Panigrahy said talks are on with the IT firm for reaching a consensus on modalities for integration of Medhabruti with Aadhar. The Department is also working on creating a system through which applications of students, who do not have Aadhar cards, can be checked for transparency, he added. The Department had recently carried out an audit of scholarships provided to 1,902 students for 2013-14 academic year by 10 engineering colleges and some institutions affiliated to Utkal University. Of 1,902 students who got the scholarship, authorities of the technical colleges and university submitted validating document of 1,246 for verification. Around 32 of these students were found ineligible for the scholarship. This apart, of 656 students whose documents were not submitted by technical colleges, the officials have found 73 fake names against which scholarship money was issued. The Higher Education Department provides Rs 10,000 every year to each engineering and professional degree student who qualifies for Medhabruti Scholarship. As many as 10,000 students are covered under the scholarship scheme and they are selected as per the rank obtained in JEE. An engineering student would get Rs 40,000 as scholarship and those pursuing five-year professional degree like MBA will receive Rs 50,000 by the end of their courses.