Kathmandu, August 19

Metropolitan Police Crime Division yesterday and today carried out coordinated raids on 23 educational consultancies that were being illegally operated in Kathmandu Valley.

The owners of these consultancies were detained with a huge cache of documents, including passports submitted to them for those supposedly aspiring to go abroad for studies.

It was the second raid of this kind after 2013 when the Central Investigation Bureau of Nepal Police took action against more than 20 education consultancies for forgery. The MPCD said it has taken 23 owners of educational consultancies into custody for further investigation.

The detainees are: Rajendra Pokharel, Bijay Kumar Basnet, Birendra Bajracharya, Anjan Kumar Thapa, Rashmi Shrestha, Shiva Aryal, Aris Uprety, Lokendra Subdei, Ram Thama, Samar Shah, Jeevan Thapa, Sudeep Parajuli, Damodar Sharma, Deepak Pudasaini, Sapana Paudel, Dev Krishna KC, Ram Chandra Oli, Gyanendra Simkhada, Shishir Wagle, Prabhat Shrestha, Kiran Adhikari, Rishi Thapaliya and Roshan Gurung.

SSP Sarbendra Khanal, MPCD in-charge, said they were operating educational consultancies without registering the business with Educational Consultancy and Accreditation Section at the Ministry of Education.

He said the raid followed complaints galore about fraudulent business practices of some illegal education consultancies in the Valley. According to MPCD, it had information that many persons were being trafficked to foreign countries in the name of studies abroad in the post disaster situation. They were also coughing up Rs 1.2 to 1.5 million from aspiring students for visa processing to send them to Japan, Cyprus, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

The raids were carried out on educational consultancies in Kupandole, Lagankhel, Putalisadak, Kamaladi, Bag Bazaar, New Baneshwor and Chabahil.

On August 12, the MPCD had arrested Gayatri Wagle, 28, a permanent resident of Deurali VDC-3, Nawalparasi, an education consultancy operator, on the charge of swindling a man of Rs 350,000, promising the victim a teaching job in Thailand. Wagle was proprietor of the unlicenced Dbest Educational Consultancy in Syuchatar. She had swindled Gokul Chhetri of Budhanilakantha Municipality-12, Kathmandu, assuring him a teaching job in Bangkok in November last year. Chhetri stayed in Thailand for 20 days after that, without getting the promised job. Frustrated, he returned home and demanded that Wagle return his money. Wagle, however, refused to return the money, and he lodged a complaint against her with the MPCD.

“Many people have been cheated by unlicensed educational consultancies that sell them dreams of a better future. We raided the educational consultancies by exercising the powers conferred by the existing laws to bring the guilty to book,” said SSP Khanal. Nearly 130 educational consultancies have been registered with the concerned agency. SSP Khanal also appealed to all to report to police if they were cheated by educational consultancies.