UPDATE

Probe into plagiarism charge

THANKS to President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, some action is now evident in the case of alleged plagiarism by B.S. Rajput, physicist and Vice-Chancellor of Kumaun University, Nainital, and his co-workers (Frontline November 8). On being asked by the President to institute an immediate inquiry, the Chancellor of the university and Uttaranchal Governor S. S. Barnala has constituted a three-member committee headed by S. R. Singh, a retired Judge of the Allahabad High Court. The other two members of the committee are K. B. Powar, a geologist and secretary-general of the Association of Indian Universities (AIU), and Indira Nath of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), general secretary of the Society for Scientific Values (SSV).

The President's initiative was in response to a letter written to him on October 11 by seven physics Professors of Stanford University, including three Nobel laureates. The Hindi daily Amar Ujala dated October 29 quoted Barnala as saying that Rajput was being unfairly criticised and that the scientists abroad were being fed false information by Indian scientists.

As detailed in the web site (http://www.geocities.com/physics_plagiarism) specially created for the purpose by Indian scientists, it was a paper by Rajput and his student S. C. Joshi, published in the journal Europhysics Letters in March this year, that led to the uncovering of a series of cases of research misconduct by Rajput and his associates. The Rajput-Joshi paper was found to be totally a copy of a work by the well-known physicist from Stanford University, Renata Kallosh, published six years earlier in the journal Physical Review D under a different title. Kallosh is one of the seven professors who wrote to the President. Other instances of plagiarisation involve combining sections from two or more papers into a single paper or using earlier works with trivial modifications and presenting them as new results. In all cases, citing the works plagiarised from is carefully avoided.

Kavita Pandey, head of the Department of Physics at Kumaun University, had played an important role in the expose. She was suspended on apparently trumped-up charges by the Vice-Chancellor, but the timing of the suspension would seem to betray the real reason to be retaliation. Scientists from premier institutions had appealed for the suspension to be revoked. The Amar Ujala report also quoted Barnala as saying that the suspension was not proper and Kavita Pandey had been reinstated. She was reinstated on October 25.

Unprecedented perhaps, the widely used SPIRES database of papers in the field of high-energy physics — Rajput's area of specialisation — now carries the following annotation against some of Rajput's papers: "The reader may verify that major portions of this article are directly copied from [reference]."

Indeed, reacting to the formation of the committee, Rajput has said: "There is no iota of truth in all this and I shall come out clean."

R. Ramachandran

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