How Degree Rackets Operate in India

In India, a university degree is often seen as a golden ticket to a stable job, social respect, and a better life. This immense societal pressure and high demand have spawned a dark, multi-crore parallel industry: the world of sophisticated degree rackets. These are not just individual acts of forgery; they are organised criminal enterprises that prey on desperation, ambition, and a lack of awareness.

Understanding how these rackets operate is the first step in protecting oneself from them. They have a well-defined structure, a diverse set of methods, and a clear target audience, making them a pervasive threat to the integrity of our education system.

A degree racket is a complex network with each player having a specific role.

At the top are the masterminds—often the owners of unaccredited, fake institutions or, more insidiously, corrupt high-ranking officials within legitimate universities. They control the entire operation, from printing fake certificates to managing the flow of money.

These are the foot soldiers of the racket. They operate on the ground and online, using social media and local contacts to find "customers." They are expert salespeople who make convincing promises of "guaranteed degrees without exams" or "back-dated certificates" for a hefty price.

This is the most critical link for the most dangerous scams. These are corrupt clerical staff, data entry operators, or examination officials within real, recognised universities. They have access to the university's official records, blank marksheets, and security holograms, allowing them to create fraudulent documents that look entirely authentic.

The clientele is diverse. It includes students who failed to secure a legitimate degree, individuals seeking a required qualification for a government job or promotion, and people looking to go abroad who need a degree for visa purposes.

Degree rackets use several methods, ranging from the crude to the highly sophisticated.

This is the most straightforward type of fraud. The racket sets up an entire fake institution from scratch. They create a professional-looking website, print glossy brochures, and may even rent a small office to serve as a "campus." These institutions are not recognised by the UGC and have no legal authority to grant degrees. Their entire business is printing and selling worthless degree certificates to unsuspecting students.

This method is far more dangerous because the final document appears genuine. Agents work in collusion with insiders at a real, recognised university. The customer pays a large sum (often lakhs of rupees), and the corrupt official illegally inserts the customer's name into the university’s official records for a previous graduating batch. A "genuine" degree and marksheet are then printed and issued. Since the student's name exists in the university's database, these degrees can often pass initial verification checks, making them very difficult to detect.

In this model, a recognised university—often a private one with lax oversight—illegally sells its name and affiliation to hundreds of small, unapproved "study centres" in different cities and states. These centres are nothing more than small teaching shops. They enrol students, conduct sham examinations (or none at all), and collect fees. The main university, in violation of UGC's territorial jurisdiction rules, simply acts as a printing press, issuing degrees to students it never taught or assessed.

This method focuses on cheating the examination process itself rather than faking the final degree. Rackets use several techniques:

You can protect yourself by looking out for these common warning signs:

Degree rackets thrive because people look for easy shortcuts. However, the price of this shortcut is devastatingly high. Getting caught with a fraudulent degree can lead to immediate job termination, social disgrace, and even criminal prosecution for fraud and forgery. The only way to build a secure future is through legitimate, hard-earned education. A few minutes of careful verification is infinitely better than a lifetime of risk and regret.