Ludhiana: A couple charged with running a fake CBSE senior secondary school with 600 students for five years and outsourcing its final-year students to rival institutes to cover up a lack of credentials is on the run.Surinder Singla and his wife, Anita Singla, had hoodwinked Punjab’s transient workers into trusting their school until a better-informed parent discovered that Global Sparks Convent International was not registered with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) as advertised.Local factory owner Gurbakhsh Singh, who uncovered the deception, had enrolled his daughter in the school’s Class I. Inspired by a news report about a similar scam, he checked the official CBSE registry online and found the school was missing from the database.When confronted, school management claimed CBSE affiliation was pending. However, Gurbakhsh Singh found out in further investigation that the senior secondary school had been operating for five years.To bypass its lack of credentials, the school allegedly outsourced the students of its board classes, X and XII, to an entirely different institute in secret to enable them to sit the final examinations. Gurbakhsh Singh said: “The illiterate, transient labourer majority of this area can’t differentiate between an ‘affiliated’ school and one claiming it is ‘to be affiliated’.”The first complaint went to the district education office, but Gurbakhsh Singh claimed officials had failed to act and school authorities had pressured him to drop the matter.It’s written in the first-information report (FIR) that when he approached police at last and an inquiry officer summoned the accused to present the school’s academic records, the couple failed to appear.The school doesn’t also operate an official website, maintaining only social media profiles on Facebook and Instagram. Calls made to at least four contact numbers listed on those pages returned as switched off.The Ludhiana police have charged the couple with cheating and criminal conspiracy under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) and launched a manhunt for them.
