Exclusive: After a three-day outage, the allindiabarexamination.com website would be online again within hours, the Bar Council of India secretary told Legally India, while ITES Horizon Pvt Ltd, the company contracted by the BCI to assist on the All India Bar Exam (AIBE), has not been possible to contact.
The allindiabarexamination.com website was built by ITES Horizon in October 2012 to allow electronic registrations in part for AIBE examinees, and to disseminate additional information. The costs for the upcoming 9 December exam were hiked by almost 50 per cent. The registration deadline was now over.
BCI secretary Jogi Ram Sharma told Legally India by telephone today that the BCI was not aware of the website having been offline. But after having sent a message to ITES, he said, the company promised at around 2pm that the site would be operational again within three hours or by this evening.
Sharma did not respond to an SMS seeking contact details for ITES Horizon, and the BCI assistant secretary and the BCI chairman were not reachable by telephone.
A message sent by Legally India to the email address listed ITES Horizon’s website bounced, the contact form did not work, and no phone number was listed on its website.
The internet Whois database, which records the details of web domains’ registrants, states that the company’s website at iteshorizon.com was registered in July 2012, and lists the name, telephone number and email address of Rakesh Neelam, based in Noida.
Neelam told Legally India he had entered into a franchise agreement with the owners of ITES Horizon around July 2012 for only one month. “After that I found it was not a reputed company I can work with”, he said, adding that he has since founded his own web and mobile technology company.
The person Neelam had liaised with in buying ITES’ domain was Alamgir Khan, who heads up another technology company in Hyderabad according to his Linked-in profile.
However, Alamgir Khan told Legally India that he was not involved in ITES at all. ITES’ current director Robab Khan had left Alamgir Khan’s company before joining ITES, but Alamgir Khan declined to confirm the date of her departure.
He said: “Information [about when she left) I can not provide you. I can not give any sort of explanation. We are not in touch with her. We have our own stuff.”
Legally India could not procure any contact details for Robab Khan, and at the time of going to press has not received a response to a message sent to her via Linked-in.
ITES Horizon Pvt Ltd was set up in 1999, according to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs’ (MCA) website. The webcheck facility to seek further information on the company was offline for maintenance on the MCA website at the time of going to press.
Full disclosure & sponsored link: BarHacker.in is an bar exam preparation service with a 100% pass rate, that is jointly owned by iPleaders and Legally India.
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The addresses given are:
ITES Horizon Pvt. Ltd. 365/08, Goyal Building, Western Marg, Saket, Delhi- 110017
and
India Development Centre : B-33, II Floor, Sector-65, Noida Uttar Pradesh India
Has anyone tried yet to contact physically at these addresses to clarify these matters?
On the contrary, this is a well-reported piece of original journalism that shows initiative and persistence.
The just-the-facts affect paints a damning picture of non-transparency in the conduct of the licensing examination for lawyers in India.
It will be even better when someone goes to the mailing address for ITES and reports on what they find. It could be a busy company trying to work with an important client on a sprawling examination.. Could be a cow shed. Be sure to upload a phone shot of whatever you find.
We should recognize the effort that has gone into this brief but very interesting piece and the genuine service it provides to the legal community.
If anyone would like to help or knows any more about ITES or how to get in touch with them, please do share it with us.
Best wishes,
Kian
www.iteshorizon.com/contact.html
It says "Acalia Development | Free CSS Template | Csstemplatesmarket.com"
Would a 13-yr old IT company be using FREE templates???
Even if they were, they would atleast change the Browser Title.
It looks like this co has been sprung up overnight for a very specific purpose!!
They are playing with careers and money of lakhs of people.
This shoddiness MUST be investigated!!
It has also become apparent that the BCI cannot conduct this exam this year. The haphazard manner in which every deadline and exam date is being postponed, it looks like a mere face-saving exercise.
Why else did they put the tender out in July. They knew they had to conduct the exam in July/August. Why wait until the very last minute to put out a tender!
Why was the tender not floated in Feb after the bar exam was conducted.
If (a) the BCI ignores a public tender and goes with another company, which did not participate in the tender, and (b) the price for the exam is hiked without an explanation, it is fair to ask who that company is and what their credentials are, particularly if there are many reasons to question the overall service that has been provided so far, the least of which being the central website that is offline for 3 days.
Nothing is implied in this story except for highlighting the fact that this company lacks all transparency, which should be a cause for concern.
Furthermore, the BCI too has had a terrible track record in transparency related to the AIBE, which includes the previous contract, of course.
Happy to hear your views on this.
Best wishes,
Kian
Quoting Law Firm:
The facts are tarnishing the company's reputation, not the reporting. You may have seen the press freedom index published the other day. India ranks 132 in the world, somewhere between Burundi and Angola. Attitudes like yours allow the government to act unfettered against responsible reporting. Post on Facebook? Get ready for jail, baby!
You are correct, however, regarding the defamation risk. Since truth is not an absolute defense against criminal defamation, not even when reporting matters of public interest such as this, anyone who reports truth to power in India is at risk of a criminal complaint or civil suit.
"We live in a rational, left brain world with global technology at our fingertips. Yet as human beings, our soul is still fired by color and imagination. Our minds are storehouses of images and memories and through them God works in our hearts. Praying with our imaginations can create a deeper and more personal intimacy with Jesus, Mary, the disciples and others written about in scripture. We can take the familiar stories we know and let them flow through our own imagination and see where the Lord guides it."
Most of the text on their website is actually plagiarised from various sources on the web. That bit is copy-pasted from here, bizarrely:
onlineministries.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/Imagination/Intro.html
[Sorry, this thread was originally posted under the wrong story for some reason. Thanks for pointing out, have moved here...]
I bet the announcement to postpone the AIBE will be made by next Tuesday prior to 3:17 pm. Just a pure goofy hunch, utter speculation. But the BCI seems awfully, awfully quiet, and the AIBE site appears not to allow one to sign in. You can just imagine the confusion and tension mounting. They're likely trying to decide whether the embarrassment of another delay will be greater than the embarrassment of disarray if they give the exam under these circumstances. But they are our elders and leaders in the profession, and so we should have faith. After all, when has the BCI ever let us down?
Haha, wow Advocate Chill, you have the time (3:17 p.m.) narrowed down to the minute! And thanks for letting us know! By the way, without asking you to compromise your sources, any indications till when it will be postponed?
Muchas gracias.
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