Fakers and cheaters

SAMBIDHAN ACHARYA

One of my relatives in Kalaiya suffered from stomach pain. She consulted a local doctor. He gave her a few tablets in a pouch. She took them as prescribed and her pain eased. However, after a month it started again. The same doctor gave another tablets, but the pain didn’t subside. During that time, one of my brothers visited her and went to the doctor. When he inquired about the doctor’s education, he wasn’t satisfied with the doctor’s answer so he mailed to the university from where the doctor claimed he had taken his degree. A day later he learned that the doctor had fraudulent certificates. My relatives then without wasting more time came to Kathmandu. Here the doctor recommended removing her fallopian tube. This incident really shook me. I then collected information from lawyers, the police and a few of my socially active friends and learned that there are more than a hundred thousand professionals in Nepal who have got jobs with fake certificates. Even a few government staffs have secured their job with bogus documents. The highest numbers of cases are of phony mark sheets. There are many firms in Nepal which do not know that they have hired phony document holders, because more than 90 per cent of the firms do not verify their employees’ documents. A few cases of forged citizenships and passports for going abroad or buying plots too are popular.

Not only mark sheets or documents but in many cases entire firms are bogus. This happens usually in manpower companies. A man with a fake SLC transcript is trapped by unregistered manpower firms. The firms find a fake company abroad and send the person. Abroad that person is trapped by immigration. Another such example of cheaters is found in networking business and cooperative finance. Networking business first collects a reasonable sum as membership fee and asks members to sell their goods claiming a certain percentage will be given to them. The members make their best attempt to sell their company’s product and later at the time to collect commissions they learn that the business owner has vanished. Same is the case with cooperative finance.

From doctors to technicians and teachers to journalists, in each and every field cheaters and fake document holders are deceiving the public every day. Even those who claim to discourage this malpractice are themselves making false documents for petty things. One of my friend who is a youth leader and a graduate from the States has made a fake student identity card just to get discounts on public vehicles and my cousin has a journalist’s ID card just for travelling during bandhs.