HSC students held for submitting forged certificate

HSC students held for submitting forged certificate
EXPRESS NEWS SERVICE

MUMBAI, MARCH 19: A Standard XII student of the New English Junior College, Kalyan, has been arrested along with her parents for producing fake certificates in order to be able to appear for her Std XII examinations. The Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education has been informed about the matter, so that it can take appropriate action.

Arpana Palshitkar (19) and her parents Chandrakant and Chandrakala have been held and charged under Sections 420 (fraud), 467 (cheating) and 34 (planning a crime in a group) of the Indian Penal Code.

The fake papers came to light when the principal of the New English Junior College, Vinayak Gaikwad, was on February 25 checking the papers of the college's 129 HSC students. ``We check if all papers are in order to ensure that there is no confusion at the time of giving leaving certificates to the students after the results are declared,'' Gaikwad said.

When he came across Palshitkar's papers, he found the corners had got dog-eared. ``I tried to straighten out the corners and simply flipped the page to find out if the page behind had got disentangled. But I saw that the birthdates on the SSC marksheet and the SSC leaving certificate differed by a year. While the leaving certificate said she was born in 1980, the marksheet said she was born a year later,'' Gaikwad said.

The principal then compared Arpana's papers with those of other students to find out other anomalies, if any. ``Her marksheet was thinner than the other SSC marksheets and fake,'' he said. He then made enquiries about the student and found she had come a year ago from Nashik, where she passed her Std XI exams privately from Ganesh Kripa Classes.

Gaikwad informed the Mahatma Phule police station on March 14. ``Since it is the first time we were handling this kind of a case, we had to change our usual style of dealing with criminals so that we found out someone in the family who would reveal everything,'' PSI Bhagwanrao Darade, who is handling the investigations, said.

Darda said that when police visited the Palshitkar residence and began interrogation, Arpana's mother confessed she and her husband had helped Arpana forge the papers so that she could carry on her studies inspite of not having cleared her SSC exams in both March and October 1998. Arpana and her father also subsequently confessed to their crime. Arpana's mother, Chandrakala, however said: ``When so many people get away with big crimes like murder, why should she be harassed for simply trying to get ahead in life?''