MUMBAI, Sept. 2 -- An advantage obtained on the basis of materially false academic credentials cannot be permitted to crystallise into an enforceable right merely by the passage of time, the Bombay high court said on Monday while rejecting petitions filed by three students of the Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies (JBIMS) whose admissions were cancelled after it emerged that their enrolment was based on forged academic credentials. All three students had completed their degrees and secured campus placements, one of them with the Boston Consulting Group. A division bench of justices RI Chagla and Firdosh Pooniwalla rejected the trio's claim about the institute being responsible for failure to detect the alleged fraud in time. The trio had secured admission through a quota meant for Children of Indian Workers in Gulf Countries (CIWGF), for which candidates are not required to appear for an entrance examination and are admitted based on their performance in qualifying examinations. Based on the documents they supplied, all the three petitioners were admitted to the two-year full time course for the 2024-26 session. The alleged fraud came to light after the institute received an anonymous email on March 6, 2026, alleging malpractices in the admission process. A three-member committee appointed by the institute subsequently found that the three petitioners had submitted forged documents reflecting grades higher than those actually obtained in their respective undergraduate degrees. The committee recommended cancellation of their admissions after noticing that they would not have secured seats based on their real scores in qualifying examinations. A second committee appointed by the institute, comprising three professors, also found that the three candidates had forged their academic credentials and recommended cancelling their admissions as well as campus placements. This decision was communicated to the students on March 27, 2026, prompting them to approach the high court. The judges, however, said that the court could not "permit passage of time, by itself, to cure an illegality which goes to the very foundation of the admission". The court asserted that the episode warranted detailed investigation. "If materially false documents were able to pass through an institutional admission process and remain undetected for nearly two academic years, the role of the persons who received, processed, scrutinised and verified those documents requires equally serious examination," the judges said....