No HC relief for 3 JBIMS students who secured admission with forged credentials

All three students had completed their degrees and secured campus placements, one of them with the Boston Consulting Group

MUMBAI: An advantage obtained on the basis of materially false academic credentials cannot be permitted to crystallise into an enforceable right merely by the passage of time, the Bombay high court said on Monday while rejecting petitions filed by three students of the Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies (JBIMS) whose admissions were cancelled after it emerged that their enrolment was based on forged academic credentials.

No HC relief for 3 JBIMS students who secured admission with forged credentials

All three students had completed their degrees and secured campus placements, one of them with the Boston Consulting Group.

A division bench of justices RI Chagla and Firdosh Pooniwalla rejected the trio’s claim about the institute being responsible for failure to detect the alleged fraud in time. The judges also rejected their plea about being allowed to receive the degrees, saying the forged academic credentials directly determined their merit positions and enabled them to obtain admissions which they would not have secured based on their actual academic records.

“To permit retention of such admissions solely because the institute discovered the alleged fraud after almost two years would create a perverse incentive,” the bench said. “It would mean that the longer an irregular admission remained undetected, the stronger the student’s claim to retain it would become. Our conscience does not permit us to accept such a principle.”

The alleged fraud came to light after the institute received an anonymous email on March 6, 2026, alleging malpractices in the admission process. A three-member committee appointed by the institute subsequently found that the three petitioners had submitted forged documents reflecting grades higher than those actually obtained in their respective undergraduate degrees.

The committee recommended cancellation of their admissions after noticing that they would not have secured seats based on their real scores in qualifying examinations.

A second committee appointed by the institute, comprising three professors, also found that the three candidates had forged their academic credentials. Like the earlier committee, it recommended cancelling their admissions as well as placements secured through the institute.

This decision was communicated to the students on March 27, 2026, prompting them to approach the high court. As the final semester examination was about to begin when the petitions were filed, the high court allowed them to appear for the examination, subject to further orders.

In the end, however, the court rejected their petitions. The judges said they were aware that cancellation at this stage had consequences which would have been materially less severe had the alleged irregularity been detected immediately after admission.

“But the court cannot permit passage of time, by itself, to cure an illegality which goes to the very foundation of the admission,” the bench said.

The court also asserted that the entire episode warranted detailed investigation, as recommended by the two committees.

“If materially false documents were able to pass through an institutional admission process and remain undetected for nearly two academic years, the role of the persons who received, processed, scrutinised and verified those documents requires equally serious examination,” the judges said.