Plagiarism controversies in india

India does not have a statuatory body to deal with misconduct in academia, like the Office of Research Integrity in the USA and hence cases of plagiarism are often dealt in ad-hoc fashion with different routes being followed in different cases. In most cases, a public and media cry leads to an investigation either by institutional authorities or by independent enquiry committees. The authors responsible for plagiarism have been at the recieving end of some severe punishments including suspension, removal and demotion. However, no fixed route has been prescibed to monitor such activities. This has led to calls for establishment of an independant ethics body.

Society for Scientific Values
Society for Scientific values is an independant body of scientists with the goal of upholding ethics in the Indian Scientific community. In absence of a statuatory body to investigate academic misconduct, the society has been acting as an independant watchdog over the years. The society has been active in recent past over several cases involving plagiarism. Prof. K.L. Chopra, ex-director of Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur is currently the president of the society while N. Raghuram of GGS Indraprastha University is the secretary.

Prof. B.S. Rajput Controversy
Prof. B.S. Rajput was the vice-chancellor of Kumaon University, India in 2002 when various physicists in India started a website alleging that some of his papers claimed authorship of work, reported earlier by other researchers. This led to an enquiry committee setup by the Governor of Uttaranchal, also the Chancellor of Kumaon University, Sudershan Agarwal to investigate the case of plagiarism in the works of Prof. B.S. Rajput and colleagues. The committe led by a retired judge of Allahabad high court Justice S.R. Singh consisted of Prof K.B. Powar, former chief of the Association of Indian Universities, New Delhi, Prof Indira Nath, former secretary of the Society of Scientific Values and AIIMS faculty member and physicist Prof R. Rajaraman of JNU. The committee investigated whether a paper written by S.C. Joshi and B.S. Rajput published in Europhysics Letters in 2002 had copied from an earlier paper by Professor Renata Kallosh. The enquiry committee concluded that this was the case. Prof. Rajput resigned from Vice-chancellorship, however maintained that he has personally done no wrong and it was his doctoral student who was responsible.

Maharshi Dayanand University
In August 2005, The Tribune published from Chandigarh, India reported a case of plagiarism in a textbook prescribed by Maharshi Dayanand University. It was reported that the book Sanskrit Bhasha Darshanam’ by Dr Yajna Vir Dahiya published in 2000 by Bhartiya Vidya Prakashan, Delhi had many chapters which were similar to a book ‘Sanskrit Vyakaran Darshan’ by Dr Ram Suresh Tripathi and published by Rajkamal Prakashan, Delhi in 1975. It was also reported that another book written by the same author entitled ‘Panini as a Linguist: Ideas and Patterns’ published in 1995 by Eastern Book Linkers, Delhi contained a chapter which which was identical to a paper written by Dr Jag Deva Singh in 1974 in the International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics (Vol III pp 287-320).

Gopal Kundu Controversy
A controversy erupted in National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS), Pune in 2006 when an anonymous mail alleged that the authors (H. Rangaswami and Colleagues) may have misrepresented data in a paper published in Journal of Biological Chemistry. The allegation was that they had published process from their own earlier work, presenting it as a new experiment. An internal committee of the NCCS advised the authors to take back their paper, however an independent committee led by G. Padmanabhan, a former director of Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, concluded that there was no manipulation in the data. This led to some heated debate between Indian Scientists with several viewpoints being presented. On 23 February 2007, the Journal of Biological Chemistry withdrew the paper amid allegations of data manipulation. The authors still maintain that the two papers used different set of data though similar experiments.

Prof. K. Kumar Controversy
In September 2007, it was reported that several papers written by Prof. Kalyan Kumar and colleagues at North Eastern Regional Institute of Science and Technology, NERIST, India had high similarity to other papers written by Bhim Singh and Colleagues from IIT, Delhi as well as papers written by Rajashekhan and colleagues. A web based campaign, similar to the one in the case of Prof B.S. Rajput has been started. Prof. Kumar and his colleagues are yet to comment on this issue.

Anna University Controversy
In 2007, appeared another controversy, this time surrounding authors from Anna University and Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR) publishing an article in the Journal of Materials Science. The article written by K. Muthukkumar, T. Mathews, S. Selladurai and R. Bokalawela was reported to be a reproduction of an article published earlier in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by David Andersson and others at the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. An enquiry has been instituted in this case.

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