A senior police officer from Delhi Police headquarters told The Sunday Express that police came to know of the matter through their sources a few days ago. (Express File)The Delhi Police has reached out to the Ministry of Education and the National Testing Agency (NTA) after it came to light that the Delhi University website had allegedly been “hacked” to help a candidate get admission unfairly, it is learnt.
Admissions to undergraduate courses in DU are currently underway, and in a first, are being held via the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) instead of Class XII marks. While there are around 70,000 undergraduate seats on offer, around 60,000 aspirants have taken admission so far. After a candidate registers on the DU’s admission portal, the university receives their CUET marks from the NTA, based on which admission is given.
A senior police officer from Delhi Police headquarters told The Sunday Express that police came to know of the matter through their sources a few days ago.
“We have informed the Ministry and the NTA to examine all the facts. We are waiting for their response before taking any legal action,” he said.
The Sunday Express has also learnt from a senior official in Delhi University that admissions of some students were “cancelled” after certain discrepancies came to light. “There are 3-4 admissions which we have cancelled because of mistakes in marks, though I’m not sure which colleges this is in. We are not sure exactly how, but we marked changes in some CUET marks the NTA had given us; there seemed to have been some increase. We are still trying to understand what exactly this is but the discrepancy came to our notice. We only have the marks given to us by NTA but the candidates would know the marks they were given in their score cards. If there was some increase in marks and they just accepted it, it would mean that either they are party to this or are taking advantage of some mistake, so the first thing that was done was that admissions were cancelled,” said the senior official.
Reached for comment on the issue, DU Registrar Dr Vikas Gupta said, “Based on the inputs of DUCC (Delhi University Computer Centre), the university performs validation of each admission after every allocation round. In case there is a mismatch in allocation of seat to any candidate based on programme eligibility and merit criteria, such cases are flagged by the system for correction. During the validation process, admissions of seven candidates were reallocated to the programme and college as per their preference and order of merit. Admissions of six candidates were cancelled. Analysis is being made to ascertain the possible reasons for systemic error or otherwise.”
NTA Director General Vineet Joshi did not respond to calls or messages seeking a comment. Highly placed sources in the NTA told The Indian Express that the Delhi Police did get in touch with the agency over a case of alleged hacking of the servers, related to one CUET (undergraduate) aspirant. “But we told the police that our servers were not hacked. The records have not been tampered with. The offline records maintained by the NTA and the records on the servers of the agency are similar,” said a source.
Police sources said the incident first came to light after the cyber cell of north district police received information from informers that a student had allegedly got admission unfairly, and they also received two different sets of marks as evidence.
“The Delhi Police Commissioner was informed by the district police and he apprised the departments concerned about the matter. Details of the student were also shared and police have also identified a suspect who may have been involved in the alleged hacking,” a police source said.
(With inputs from Sourav Roy Barman)