Bhubaneswar, Jan. 13: Students apprehensive of dubious recruiters can now breathe free.

A team of young techies in the state has developed a web portal that alerts students against fake recruiters. The portal, Campus Connect, can be accessed at “http://cc.bputstudents.com”. It contains up-to-date details on campus recruitment drives in colleges and universities across Odisha.

At present, the site has placement data for Biju Patnaik University of Technology, Veer Surendra Sai University of Technology in Burla, Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan University, KIIT University, International Institute of Information Technology, Bhubaneswar, and Centurion University.

Given the global economic recession, popular companies that once used to frequent campuses for recruitment have cut down on their hiring spree. Meanwhile, lesser known companies have surfaced, offering jobs to candidates. In the absence of viable alternatives, students tend to go for these jobs and sign the contracts only to be duped.

“The aim is to promote transparency on campus placements by making real-time authenticated data available and accessible to everyone. One can also verify false claims made by professional colleges during admission season to mislead students,” said Chandrashekhar Panda, the brain behind the portal.

He said the trend of unregistered companies conducting campus drive at colleges has risen in the past two years. They were allegedly issuing fake joining letters and offer letters by charging money from the students.

“Generally colleges do not check the credentials of the company before letting them in for campus drives and gullible students are often taken for a ride,” said Panda.

The web portal enlists blacklisted, fake or fraud companies by marking them in a separate category to alert students. It also contains a section where one can verify the company and its operations in the country.

“In the near future we are planning to come up with Android and iPhone applications for this initiative,” said Panda.

Campus Connect was launched in 2011 to share campus updates of all colleges through Facebook.

The forum that initially started with a handful of students has more than 20,000 active members now.

For the academic year 2011-12, the Campus Connect team gathered data for 694 placement events in Odisha. For 2012-13, it has the data for 177 recruitment drives (data available till December 31, 2012).