New Delhi, June 12: Over 100 universities and recruitment boards have signed up to use the Central Board of Secondary Education's online repository of school-leaver certificates and mark sheets to verify the credentials of applicants.

Admission authorities at Delhi University today said they too would register with the national school board's first-of-its-kind academic repository, Parinam Manjusha.

"From this year, we may use the CBSE's online platform when verification is required," said Ashutosh Bhardwaj, officer on special duty (admissions), Delhi University.

There have been instances of students securing admission with forged mark sheets or forged caste certificates.

The CBSE started the online certificate authentication facility - for its successful Class X and Class XII examinees - six months ago to enable recruiters, other school education boards and higher education institutions to easily verify the documents.

Registration is free but the user needs to pay about Rs 150 per document verified. Earlier, the CBSE used to charge about Rs 500 to physically verify a certificate, an exercise that took at least one week.

Currently, the repository has the certificates of students who cleared their exams between 2014 and 2017. As it updates the repository every year with the latest certificates, the board will also extend the content to the years before 2014.

Registered users need to enter a student's roll number and the exam year, and the screen immediately displays the original certificate.

A CBSE official said the foreign ministry, which receives a lot of requests from Indian students abroad to authenticate their educational certificates, too was using the online repository. Earlier, the Indian missions used to forward the requests to the CBSE for physical authentication.

Before granting registration, the CBSE verifies the credentials of the applicants, the official said. That's why only 100 school and recruitment boards and varsities have been registered so far while another 500 applicants are waiting.

School education boards from Jharkhand, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra are among those that have registered while Shiv Nadar University, the Birla Education Trust, Ranchi University, and the Railway Recruitment Board, Secunderabad, have applied.

No university from Bihar, Bengal, Odisha or Delhi has applied yet.

The human resource development ministry has begun the process of launching a similar online repository for the verification of university certificates.