The academic community in the city was in for a big shock this past week when the former Delhi University Vice-Chancellor, Deepak Pental, was forced to spend a few hours in jail.
He was accused of a crime feared by all academics because of the obvious implications to their careers — plagiarism. Prof. Pental was also accused of forgery, misappropriation of property and cheating, among other things.
“This case had been going on for several years. I was forced to take legal recourse after nothing was resolved within the University,” says P. Pardha Saradhi, the complainant in the case.
Prof. Saradhi has now written to the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development, a copy of which is with The Hindu , accusing a few more professors in the University of plagiarism.
He has quoted examples and furnished proof of the research material that has been plagiarised. He has also accused certain professors of training their students to steal research from other professors.
This is not all. A few months ago, the Ministry had set up its own committee to investigate some complaints of plagiarism against certain DU professors.
Following this, the Delhi University Teachers’ Association (DUTA) had demanded an investigation into “charges” of plagiarism made against V-C Dinesh Singh in 2012.
“Taint”Prof. Singh had maintained that his researcher profile on “ResearcherID”, a website maintained by a newswire, had been hacked and that a complaint had been lodged with the Delhi Police.
This “taint” is not just limited to DU. The Jawaharlal Nehru University here, which is mostly a research-oriented institution in the country, is more susceptible to this issue. A top-of-the-line software to identify plagiarised material has been installed there and every thesis is put through the test. But even that is not fool-proof.
“Recently we caught a thesis, 50 per cent of which was plagiarised. And we were told to approve it since six other projects had more plagiarised content. The committee on research here didn’t stop it from getting approved. The external examinees were aghast when they found out. This was mortifying in the extreme,” said Arun Kumar, the president of the JNU Teachers’ Association (JNUTA).
Prof. Kumar added that the software worked by identifying a string of words that appeared anywhere on the web, and that more the sequence of words found similar, the higher the percentage of plagiarism.
“Students translate the plagiarised material from the Internet into a different language and then translate it back into English, thus the sequence of words is changed a bit. Or they just move phrases here and there,” he said.
Prof. Kumar says the JNUTA was forced to form a committee and look into the matter to suggest concrete remedies since the University administration refused to do anything to curb the malaise, other than make vague promises of writing to the Ministry and the UGC.
“They do not want to associate the University with the word plagiarism. So in order to protect their reputation, they want to ignore the fact that this is happening inside the University. Our students are mostly groomed for academics. This has deeper implications due to this fact alone,” he added.
The Jamia Millia Islamia also found out and returned for re-work as many as 59 projects plagiarised by students and some faculty after it installed an anti-plagiarism software.
