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CRIME: COMPUTER EDUCATION
Zapped For Cash
Students across the country find themselves fleeced
by a training institute chain in a scam suspected to be worth Rs 200 crore
By Sayantan Chakravarty
and Sheela Raval
Once you're done with the E-Connect course,
and found acceptable, we could be absorbing you into the company. Using
you in several Internet startups.
—Full page Zap Infotech advertisement.
 All
through last year the Zap advertisements held out promises like these
and more. In gawdy hues, splashed over entire pages of leading dailies,
and in popular TV channels. The ads had magnetic appeal; the big bucks
began to flow when the young, dreaming digital futures and foreign jobs,
rushed to join the "less expensive" but "more attractive"
courses in droves. Prospective franchisees lined up in dozens to run the
centres. Not just Zap, but also the ones run by Wintech, both managed
by the Mithani brothers (Arif, Abbassi, Murtaza), directors of Zap and
Wintech.
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FLASHY ADS WERE
THE LURE
COURTING TROUBLE: Bhan (above), the regional head of Zap Infotech,
and other executives (below) in Tis Hazari courts in Delhi even as
duped students look on. |
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Then suddenly the dreams were stolen away. Kanada
Singh had enrolled himself at a course fee of Rs 17,500 at a Zap centre
in west Delhi last year. Within weeks of joining he learnt that a lot
was amiss. Instructors seldom got paid, so they paid little attention
to the students. Then one day last week reality hit him squarely on the
jaw-the computer centre, like many others run by Zap and Wintech in Mumbai
and Delhi, shut down, and most of its administrators disappeared. "They
refused to refund my course fees. The centre's shut," he says in
his complaint to the police. Ditto with Swati Negi, a commerce graduate,
who had enrolled for a Wintech course in Mumbai with the hope of flying
to Australia some day. She coughed up Rs 17,000, but was "zapped"
to find the shutters of her centre down last week.
Based on complaints by Kanada and nearly 200
others from the same institute, the Delhi Police lodged an fir on May
29 against Zap officials and arrested three top executives-regional manager
Sushil Bhan, zonal manager Anshuman Mathur and media promotion executive
Deepanjan Lahiri. The arrests were meant to launch a much-needed probe
into the seedy world of computer training centres and the brazen money-spinning
ways of their fly-by-night operators across the country. Says DCP (West)
Kewal Singh: "I believe there is a powerful underworld gang that
is behind the scam. Efforts will not be spared to get to the bottom of
this." Adds ACP Rishi Pal who is overseeing the case: "We have
to ensure that other such firms do not fleece students and franchisees."
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PROBE TRAIL
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# Arrests
of three Delhi-based executives of Zap blows the lid off a multi-crore
computer education racket.
# Also involved is sister concern Wintech
in Mumbai. More than 2,000 students in about 300 centres stand cheated.
# The law enforcers are on the trail of
the three Mithani brothers, directors in the two firms. One has
disappeared, others are travelling abroad.
# Police say that franchisees and students
are flocking to lodge complaints.
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The underworld connection that Singh talks about
remains nebulous and speculative. What is known is that between them the
two firms franchised about 300 centres across India's major cities and
a few others in Dubai called WinZap. The dimensions of the scandal could
be in excess of Rs 200 crore, considering only current enrolment. The
calculations are simple; average course fees of about Rs 25,000 per student;
at least 100 students per centre (the west Delhi centre where Kanada enrolled
had over 650). The onus of providing the infrastructure, machines, promotional
expenses and recruiting teachers lay with the franchisees; Zap and Wintech
were only to lend their names and pay the teachers. All that Zap and Wintech
spent was Rs 5-8 crore for the newspaper and TV advertisements; the rest
of the collections were a steal.
In the early days, Zap followed up its advertisement
blitzkrieg by recruiting young instructors from established computer houses-NIIT
and Aptech-and offering them handsome salary hikes. This recruitment drive
was part of the hype to lure prospective students to the new centres.
Within weeks, though, the lot of instructors would be sent away to new
centres, and senior students would replace them as instructors. It turned
out to be a cunning cost-cutting exercise that the Zap bosses deployed
till the operations suddenly began to fold up.
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