Mangaluru, Oct 21: In order to prevent forgery of marks cards and degree certificates, the Mangalore University has decided to adopt Near-Field Communication (NFC) technology.
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.
“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,” Prof A M Khan, Registrar of Evaluation at MU, said.
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.
Comments
Markscard
Add new comment