Bhubaneswar, May 24: Hundreds of students of Siksha 'O' Anusandhan (S'O'A) University scuffled with police and the varsity's security personnel today while staging a demonstration against 'fake' placements of more than 400 engineering students.

The agitators accused the authorities of the university of ruining their lives by organising such placement interviews on campus. "We have spent so much money to pay for our engineering courses, but at the end, we only got offer letters that have turned out to be fake. Some of the companies in which we have got placements informed us that they have never visited our campus," alleged Subashish Patnaik, a fourth-year student of mechanical engineering.

The university, one of the top private-runs centres in the state, had organised a placement drive for students of its BTech courses from November to March. More than 60 companies had taken part in the placement drive. The students, who were successful, were provided with call letters and subsequently joining letters after going through several rounds of written tests, group discussions and personal interviews.

However, when 50 of the selected students reached the offices of the company in Gurgaon in Delhi according to the date mentioned in their joining letters, they were in for a rude shock. The company they were supposed to join denied having conducted any such placement drive at the university. The company authorities also denied issuing any letters to the new recruits.

As soon as the incident came to light, the students got in touch with authorities of the university. The varsity authorities then conducted a verification process with various companies that had come for the placement drive and found that the joining and offer letters issued by nine companies were fake.

"I was provided with a joining letter from an engineering company and I was supposed to join on June 5. But after I got to know that some of my classmates had been cheated, I crosschecked with the company and found that it was not part of any placement drive at our institute. We were very happy over the past few months, having got offer letters from some of the top tech companies in the country, but our dreams have now been shattered," said Pratik Mishra, a student of civil engineering.

After the incident came to light, several students turned up at the university, within Khandagiri police limits, to protest against the varsity authorities. They had a minor scuffle with the cops when they tried to remove the students from the premises.

The university was among the four educational institutions from the state to make it to the list of 100 best educational institutes in the country, according to the ministry of human resources development last month. The university, which was also accredited A grade by NAAC, was placed at 33rd place in the list.

Cornered by the students' protest, the university authorities have now come up with three options to compensate the victims. "We will engage them as teaching assistants for a period of one year, or till they get jobs, with a monthly stipend of Rs 20,000. Affected students wishing to pursue MTech in the university will be exempted from paying the course fee and for those willing to pursue an MBA degree, the university will bear the course fee for the first year," said varsity registrar B.B. Pradhan.

University authorities, however, said they were duped by a Gurgaon-based consultancy, which conducted the campus drive on behalf of the nine companies. "The consultancy took a hefty fee to recruit our students, but ended up duping them. Later, we came to know that the same consultancy had cheated students in Bangalore as well in a similar manner. We will lodge a formal compliant with the police soon," said a varsity official, who refused to be named.