Southern States - Karnataka-Bangalore

Cheats will now find it tough to fly to U.S.

A significant number of H1-B visa applicants come from Bangalore, the IT hub of the country, where software professionals are constantly looking for greener pastures, mainly in the U.S. The American Consulate has sought the help of universities in the State to check the rising cases of people producing false educational certificates to obtain visas, writes K.Satyamurty

AS THE lure of lucre from software jobs in the United States keeps increasing again, cases of fraudulent visa applications appear to be rising too.

In a recent incident, a H1-B visa applicant working for a prominent Bangalore-based software company is said to have produced false certificates, supposedly issued by Gulbarga University. When enquiries were being made about authenticity of the documents, the software engineer decided to skip town.

A significant number of H1-B visa applicants come from Bangalore, the IT hub of the country, where software professionals are constantly looking for greener pastures, mainly in the U.S. Some have already worked with client companies there and the attractions are more for them. Others who have heard of the living standards and money to be made overseas are constantly looking out for openings there.

It is against this background that the American Consulate in Chennai has roped in major universities in Karnataka such as Bangalore University, Mysore University, Gulbarga University, Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU), and Karnatak University to tackle cases of fraudulent educational qualifications being used to obtain visas to the U.S.

The Anti-Fraud Division of the U.S. Consulate has now teamed up with the Information Technology Secretariat of Karnataka to track down offenders through a specially created University Degree Verification System (UDVS). Initially, officials from these universities have offered their database of graduates from 1977 onwards in the disciplines most sought after by companies in the U.S. These include graduates in engineering and architecture (B.E. and B.Arch) and those who have done MCA, among others. The IT Secretariat will use software developed by Wipro Technologies for the U.S. Consulate.

The software will capture all relevant information regarding the students who have graduated from these universities.

The Vice-Consul at the American Consulate General, Amanda B.Cronkhite, said the UDVS would check the authenticity of certificates suspected to be false. "Since the marks and certificates will be stored in the database, we will access this information to clear the visa applicant, she said.

The "anti-fraud" tool will take less than five seconds to find out if the submitted degree certificate is genuine or not. As an online system it will also reduce the visa process time.

Since 1998, there has been a 400 per cent increase in the number of visa applications processed by the consulate in Chennai.

Before September last year, the consulate processed 1.84 lakh visas, of which around 3,500 were H1-B visas, Ms. Cronkhite said. About five per cent of visa applications may come with fake educational certificates and this may reduce as had happened in Andhra Pradesh, which topped in the number of such cases in the South. During 2000, the consulate detected about 100 fake certificates of Bangalore, Mysore, and Gulbarga universities.

The IT Secretary, Vivek Kulkarni, said the VTU would be a one-point source for the database of engineering graduates while other universities would provide information about software graduates.

Since most IT graduates are young, if a university provided data from 1993 onwards it should be sufficient, he said.

There will be a deterrent for those seeking U.S. visas with fake certificates: they may find their entry to that country barred for their lifetime.

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