M'lore varsity to use NFC-enabled marks cards to check forgery Meghana Choukkar

Mangalore University will make its marks cards and degree certificates fake-proof by adopting the use of Near-Field Communication (NFC) technology. There have been many cases of candidates producing fake marks cards and certificates.

The state higher education department had even recommended last year that universities procure marks cards from Mysore Sales International Ltd, with tear-resistant and tamper-proof features.
 
Registrar of Evaluation at MU, Prof A M Khan said, “The Karnataka government had issued a circular saying we could use technology like NFC to prevent forgery. We took feedback from Gulbarga and Ballari university, which have adopted this technology, and it was positive.”

The university has called for tenders to supply marks cards and convocation certificates embedded with NFC microchips for all undergraduate and postgraduate courses from this year.

Khan said the chip is usually a small square or circle, about the size of a 25 paise coin. “The microchip will have a unique code and ID which cannot be faked. This will be linked to the student’s marks and certificate details which will be on a secured cloud-based server.”

Anyone who wants to verify the card just has to tap an NFC-enabled smartphone on the chip and information such as contents of the marks card or certificate will be retrieved from the server. This data is wirelessly transferred to the phone in a matter of seconds and can be viewed on the screen.

According to the tender document, the university has estimated that it will require 20,000 convocation certificates a year and 2.5 lakh marks cards. Besides the NFC microchip, the cards will have regular security features such as watermarks and holograms.