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New Delhi ,(BiharTimes):
Days after the expiry of the term of its interim Governing Board, the NalandaUniversity is gone off the Internet again. The official website www.nalandauniversity.org is no longer accessible to the visitors since Wednesday morning. A search into the domain name registry reveals the last back-end updating had taken place on Tuesday November 29. |
The website was soft-launched on October 6, 2011 coinciding with Prof. Amartya Sen’s 'Open Session on Nalanda University' at New Delhi’s Nehru Memorial Museum & Library.
Ironically, the University touted as 'international' was running without an website since its inception on November 25, 2010. The project itself was being pursued without a website and utmost non-transparency since July, 2007.
The registration of the website was controversial to begin with. It was registered in the name of one Ashu Gupta, at the address of an NGO viz. Goonj. The telephone number 011-26952454 used for the purpose happens to be the personal telephone number of Anshu Gupta, founder of the NGO and a CNN-IBN Real Life Hero Awardee. When the registration expired on November 9, 2011 the same was renewed for another year in the name of Gupta. Incidentally Gupta happens to hold registration of related domain names like thenalandauniversity.org, nalandauniv.org etc which put him the category of cyber-squatterer.
Why the NalandaUniversity chose to host its outlandish website on an unauthorized domain name is difficult to comprehend, given the fact that the University has already four qualified domain addresses registered in its own name since December 2010. However, there seems to be a plausible connection between the expiry of term of its governing board and the website going off the Internet. The NalandaUniversity was the baby of the Nalanda Mentor Group, later upgraded into the interim Governing Board. With the exit of the Governing Board, which neither framed the statutes nor worked on a succession plan, the chips are down for the NalandaUniversity. The University might become nobody’s baby. We might witness several other changes in the coming days. Bihar Times played a seminal and consistent role in exposing the scandal taking place under the fair name of Nalanda. Mired in controversy, the Ministry of External Affairs might be looking for a statutory device to oust the Nalanda Mentor Group. But unfortunately all these might be done under the cloak. The dismantling of NalandaUniversity headquartered at New Delhi might happen in the same secretive and arbitrary manner it was built. Bihar Times, however, is committed to bring the complete truth to light.
To search for domain names- http://whois.domaintools.com/
A glimpose of nalandauniversity.org retrieved from the cache- http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.nalandauniversity.org/
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