This year, the Indian education system was clouded by controversies about exam malpractice allegations. From suspicions of a leak in the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test for Undergraduate (NEET UG 2024) admissions to panic about a possible breach in the integrity of the University Grants Commission - National Eligibility Test (UGC-NET) 2024 — a litany of scandals have led to widespread distrust in India’s education system at large.
However, beyond these headline-grabbing controversies, the Indian education system — and more particularly, Indian academia — is plagued by a larger, more prevalent, and less-talked-about ill: one of research malpractice.
About 93 research papers have been retracted from 69 journals between 2007 and 2022 due to data manipulation, according to a study titled Analysis of Retracted Publications by Indian Authors due to Falsification or Fabrication of Data. In addition, the Times of India reports that 58 research papers published by various Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) were retracted from publication for three reasons — plagiarism of text, plagiarism of article, and duplication of article.
A study by Dhulika Dhingra and Devendra Mishra titled Publication Misconduct among medical professionals in India reported that among malpractices in medical research, 65 per cent comprised gift authorship, 53 per cent pertained to instances of plagiarism, and denying credit to rightful authors comprised 33.5 per cent of the cases.
Incidentally, one former professor from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi and a whistleblower alleges to be a victim of these malpractices and has been fighting for justice for the past year.
The issue
Prof Rajeev Kumar, who taught at the School of Computer and Systems Sciences accuses one Om Prakash, his former PhD mentee of stealing his research and reproducing it in an independent paper.
This paper, titled Detection of Fake Accounts on Social Media Using Multimodal Data With Deep Learning was published in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Transactions on Computational Social Systems journal (IEEE or IEEE TCSS) on August 7, 2023.
Interestingly, seven other academics besides Om Prakash were listed as the paper’s authors — two of whom are from international universities. These are:
Bharti Goyal, Prof Nasib Singh Gill, and Dr Preeti Gulia from the Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak, India
Dr Ishani Priyadarshini from the School of Information, University of Berklee, California, the United States of America
Prof Rohit Sharma, Dean of Research at ABES Engineering College, Gaziabad, the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Ghaziabad, India and the Scientific Research Center, Islamic University, Iraq
Ahmed J Obaid from the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Computer Science and Mathematics, University of Kufa, Kufa, Iraq
Kusum Yadav from the Department of Computer Science Engineering at the University of Hail, Saudi Arabia and Computers and Applications, Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak, India
Prof Kumar, having retired in March 2024, is no longer Om Prakash’s PhD supervisor — but has been working as his guide since 2018, when he was an Integrated-MPhil student at the department.
Currently, Prof DK Lobiyal, Former Dean of the School of Computer and Systems Sciences is Om Prakash’s PhD supervisor, as ordered by the Delhi High Court in February this year.
Prof Kumar takes action, reassurances ensue
Speaking with EdexLive, Prof Kumar said that he immediately reached out to Om Prakash on August 14, 2023, when he found out about the paper. Following this, Om Prakash admitted his guilt and expressed his commitment to rebuilding trust.
It was around this time, that Prof Kumar also reached out to Prof Nasib Singh Gill, one of the authors named in the IEEE paper, informing him of the situation.
In a follow-up email sent by him on August 19, 2023, which EdexLive has access to, Prof Kumar mentioned that the research, conducted during the course of Om Prakash’s PhD and centred around the “core concepts of Multi-Modality and Generalisation of ML/DL” was mainly his work.
“Conceptualisation, modelling, design, part-writing, analysis of results, corrections, reviewing etc were all done by me. Om Prakash contributed to part of the literature survey, implementation, part writing, and generating results,” Prof Kumar wrote.
He also pointed out how none of the authors of the IEEE paper worked on the aforementioned core concepts of Multi-Modality and Generalisation of ML/DL, and that the students and scholars who worked under him were not authorised to collaborate with any other party without his consent.
Replying to his mail on the same day, Prof Gill assured Prof Kumar that they forwarded his mail to the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE TCSS Journal, and the process to retract the paper was initiated.
He also mentioned that he was not aware of the matter and that Om Prakash shared the research with Bharti Goyal, of whom Prof Gill was the research supervisor.
Prof Rohit Sharma, another academic mentioned in the paper as its author, also reached out to Prof Kumar, assuring him that the process to withdraw the paper from the IEEE TSCS journal was initiated.
Soon enough, on August 23, 2023, IEEE informed Prof Gill that the paper had been withdrawn. However, the paper was still available on the IEEE Xplore digital library, the research database of the journal.
Prof Kumar moves to the police; matter still status quo
Finding that the paper was still live on the IEEE Xplore digital library, Prof Kumar on December 18, 2023, wrote to Prof Bin Hu, the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE TSCS Journal, alleging plagiarism and gift authorship by Om Prakash and the other authors of the paper.
In his email, accessed by EdexLive, he stated that Om Prakash copied research methodology, results, and mistakes from research done by both of them from his PhD verbatim and that the original research was not publicly available by the time the IEEE research paper was published, due to “deliberately” delayed PhD submissions.
Further, Prof Kumar also wrote that he suspected gift authorship by Dr Ishani Priyadarshini, Prof Kusum Yadav, and Prof Rohit Sharma. He also pointed out that the latter had more than 50 publications from 2023, and has co-authored more than 1500 research articles.
He also claimed that none of the authors satisfied the definition of authorship laid out by the IEEE, which specifies the following criteria on its website:
Made a significant intellectual contribution to the theoretical development, system or experimental design, prototype development, and/or the analysis and interpretation of data associated with the work contained in the article;
Contributed to drafting the article or reviewing and/or revising it for intellectual content; and
Approved the final version of the article as accepted for publication, including references.
Thus, he requested the complete retraction of the paper, a ban on the eight authors from publishing this paper and anything from related subjects, and an investigation into the matter.
He told EdexLive that he also told Om Prakash that he would approve his PhD if he withdrew his authorship of the IEEE paper, as the JNU PhD Ordinance prohibits research scholars from submitting their PhD research to any other Institution.
On January 4, 2024, Om Prakash also wrote to Prof Bin Hu, admitting to sharing “ideas related to the implementation of LTSM (Long Short-Term Memory) and CNN (Convolutional Neural Network)”, two memory networks in the field of Machine Learning.
Further, he requested the withdrawal of his authorship of the paper, so that he could “resume academic activities normally”. He also requested Dr Kumar on January 7 to accept the submission of his PhD thesis, as he requested the IEEE to have his authorship of the paper withdrawn.
However, Prof Kumar wrote to the Deputy Commissioner of Police, South West District, New Delhi, requesting a formal police complaint on Om Prakash and the other authors of the paper under various sections of the Indian Penal Code, including 120A (Criminal Conspiracy), 381 (Theft), 411 (dishonestly receiving stolen (digital) property), and on account of infringements of the Copyright Act of 2012.
“I conceptualised, crystallised, defined, formulated, and designed these contents, This intellectual knowledge was hard-earned after four decades of my tenacious research efforts in premier academic and research institutions in India and abroad,” he wrote to the DCP. Alleging a conspiracy in the matter, Prof Kumar stated, “There are huge financial and non-financial gains in addition to the worldwide ownership of this high-impact research.”
In a follow-up letter to the DCP, Prof Kumar wrote that the police questioning of Om Prakash and an investigation of his laptop revealed that he shared the research with Bharti Goyal in February 2023. Further, it was also revealed that the names of the other authors were added to the research paper and submitted to the IEEE by Dr Rohit Sharma.
He urged in this letter, submitted on July 4, 2024, that a First Investigation Report (FIR) be registered in this “long pending case”, as the new evidence only strengthened his case.
“JNU apathetic to my complaint”, claims Dr Kumar
When asked about Prof Kumar’s allegations, Prof Gill told EdexLive that he agreed to have the paper withdrawn after he got to know that Om Prakash collaborated with Bharti Goyal, his PhD mentee without Prof Kumar’s consent.
However, he did not acknowledge Prof Kumar’s concerns about Om Prakash stealing his research and wrote off his attempts at redressal as him trying to stir up controversy. “If he thinks that his research was stolen by his PhD mentee, he needs to take it up with the individual and his university. I do not know why he is involving the police,” Prof Gill said. Further, he also alleged that Prof Kumar was “harassing” Om Prakash over the issue.
EdexLive reached out to Om Prakash to verify this claim, but he did not respond.
Responding to these allegations, Prof Kumar said that he only approached the police as he suspected a conspiracy and a money trail. “If Om Prakash did not do this, he would have completed his PhD, and be working as an assistant professor by now. But he still chose to engage in malpractice,” he alleged. He added that he could not let his life’s work be stolen by “paper-mill authors” in this manner.
On July 17, 2024, Dr Kumar wrote to Dr Santishree Pandit, the Vice-Chancellor and Dr Zahid Raza, Chairperson of the Academic Council, JNU, urging them to amend the “flawed” JNU PhD ordinance about the appointment of new PhD Supervisors and formulate regulations to prevent academic fraud like gift authoring and gift supervision.
In the letter, he contested the appointment of Prof Lobiyal as the PhD guide to his two mentees — Akhilesh Rawat and Om Prakash — following his retirement, as he did not contribute to their research.
He took issue with Section 6.5 of the JNU PhD ordinance, which states, “If a Research Supervisor, under whose guidance a thesis has been prepared in part or in full, ceases to be a teacher of the University, the Research Scholar shall be allotted a new Research Supervisor", pointing that research supervisors in most higher education institutions in India, like the IITs are allowed to remain the sole supervisors for research purposes and appoint a caretaker supervisor for administrative functions.
Further, Prof Kumar alleges that his mentees were made to name another supervisor during their PhD, as he would be retiring in the next three years, as directed by the former Vice-Chancellor of JNU, Prof Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar. He wrote, “... no other student from forty-six faculty members retiring within the next three years received similar instructions.”
In his defence, Prof Lobiyal told EdexLive that while he disagreed with this selective treatment meted out to Prof Rajeev Kumar, he only went ahead with the appointment as it was through a court order, and not doing so would be tantamount to contempt of court.
The JEE matter
Several faculty members attested to the fact that Prof Rajeev Kumar had an antagonistic relationship with the former VC of JNU — perhaps stemming from their involvement in the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE).
To recall, Rajeev Kumar exposed several widespread discrepancies in the JEE in 2006, during his tenure at IIT Kharagpur, and was hailed an “unsung hero” by the Supreme Court in 2011. During this time, Prof Jagadesh Kumar also served as a board member of the JEE.
In 2020, Prof Rajeev Kumar was accused of “misbehaving” with two external experts during a Board of Studies meeting, following which, an inquiry was launched against him by Prof Jagadesh Kumar. Due to this inquiry, vigilance clearance was withheld from him, preventing him from applying for higher positions, reports The Telegraph.
This inquiry was not annulled even after Prof Jagadesh Kumar moved on from the VC’s office and was succeeded by Prof Santishree Pandit, and was only done so by intervention by the President’s office and Ministry of Education, Prof Rajeev Kumar told EdexLive. Due to this troubled history, the former professor is not confident that the administration of JNU would heed his request for redressal.
