Kathmandu, August 21

Metropolitan Police Crime Division today booked 11 illegally operated educational consultancies and arrested their proprietors in coordinated raids across the capital.

In the second such raid in four days, the police swooped on unlicensed educational consultancies in Kalimati, Dhobidhara, Kalanki, and Thapathali. Sadhana Basnet, Ram Kumar Ranjitkar, Pravin Shahi, Amrit Prasad Pantha, Pem Lal Nepali, Dhruba Prasad Parajuli, Deepak Shah, Sanjog Thapa Magar, Hira Kumar Budhathoki, Jonson Maharjan, Kiran Simkhada and Gopal Adhikari were detained for running illegal consultancies.

SSP Sarbendra Khanal, MPCD in-charge, said those arrested were suspected of siphoning off money from unemployed youths with false promises of sending them abroad for employment. Such illegally-run educational consultancies are not registered with Educational Consultancy and Accreditation Section under the Ministry of Education.

Of the detainees, Basnet and Ranjitkar, operators of Kalimati-based Express Entry Education World Pvt Ltd, have been charged with fraud for allegedly swindling unemployed youths of hefty sums by promising them security guards’ jobs in South Africa.

SSP Khanal said 11 victims had lodged complaint against the duo, accusing the latter of charging Rs 550,000 from each of the victims ‘for visa processing, labour permit and documentation’. The existing law does not permit education consultancies to send people on foreign employment as labour agents.

MPCD had appealed all to report to police if they were cheated by the educational consultancies after it raided 23 institutions in the Kathmandu Valley on Tuesday and arrested as many operators on charges of fraud and forgery. According to MPCD, the raids followed complaints about fraudulent business practice of some illegal education consultancies in the Valley.

Educational Consultancy Association of Nepal had protested the police action on the institutions yesterday, urging police not to put all educational institutions in the same basket.