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CRIME: COMPUTER EDUCATION
Warning Signals Ignored
The scam was brewing
a while. But somehow the warning signals went unheeded. Teachers at several
centres were not being paid. Says Rahul Gupta, instructor at Kanada's
centre: "We have not received pay cheques for the past few months."
Adds his colleague, programmer Ashish Chadha: "We were told that
the company was going through a financial crisis. Ground realities, however,
suggested it wasn't true." The franchisees (fearing underworld retribution
they do not want to be named) were not getting their returns. The agreement
between them and the directors of Zap and Wintech states that all earnings
by the franchisees were to be deposited into an escrow account and then
split. The investors deposited their earnings, but these were reportedly
siphoned off. When they demanded their share or approached the police,
many of them were threatened with dire consequences.
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HOPE TO DESPAIR
Students outside Wintech's Kandivili centre in Mumbai. Over 150 students
in the city have lodged complaints with the police. |
In Mumbai, over 150 students have lodged complaints
with the Economic Offences Wing of the local police against Wintech. As
in Delhi, charges of criminal breach of trust, cheating and criminal conspiracy
have been slapped against the administrators. Eighteen branches of the
computer centre have shut down in the last week, and students were left
with nowhere to go to complete their unfinished courses in such trendy
but tough subjects as interactive multimedia web designing, web application
development, internet security, e-commerce and embedded java. These students
had shelled out between Rs 15,000 and Rs 65,000 each. "I am a victim
of daylight robbery," fumes Manisha Singh, a Bombay High Court advocate
who joined Wintech classes about a month ago and was never too pleased
with the "callous attitude" of the management at Wintech, Fort.
To bring some justice to hapless victims like
Manisha the investigation needs to be meticulous. The key lies in the
questioning of the Mithani brothers and other senior executives. Murtaza
Mithani, the Wintech proprietor, and his family have been absconding for
the past three weeks along with Mohib Patil, the president.
Murtaza's track record suggests that so far
he has been lucky. Last year, he was arrested in Vadodara for cheating
a franchisee. He was again arrested for pirating a popular Oracle software.
"We believe that most of the software used in Zap centres is pirated,"
says DCP Singh. Mithani's "undesirable" Dubai connections have
also become a cause for concern. Says Senior Inspector (social service)
Shirish Inamdar: "We are wary of his activities. He is in touch with
unscrupulous people." But Arif told India Today from Australia :"I
am shocked by the accusations. These harm overall business interests.
Besides, I have nothing to do with computer education. I'm in the field
of communications."
He may be shocked but so are hundreds of students
and franchisees baying for the Mithanis' blood. In the end the words of
Pramod Khera, CEO, Aptech, sum up the crisis well: "There isn't a
short cut to quality education." The two-year-old startup that promised
a six- month fast lane to learning may prove him right.
-With Himanshi Dhawan
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