The News Minute | November 25, 2014 | 6.18 pm IST
Former Delhi University vice chancellor Deepal Pental was arrested and sent to Tihar jail on Tuesday after a fellow professor complained of plagiarism and illegally using a chemical substance from the university's science lab.
Professor P Parthasarthy, had accused Pental of plagiarising his paper on biotechnology.
Instances of plagiarism are a dime a dozen among students, from the intricate web of copy-paste from multiple sources so as to disguise the trail, to the lazy bulk copying from the Wikipedia entry. But even cases of professors and academicians copying from the work of others is not unheard of. Here are some instances where very senior academicians including Vice Chancellors of universities have been accused of plagiarising.
Kerala University
A professor of psychiatry at an American institute has recently alleged that the Pro Vice Chancellor (PVC) of the University of Kerala V. Veeramanikantan had plagiarised from his work. The matter came to light earlier this month.
Veeramanikantan has been accused of plagiarising around 42 percent of his doctoral thesis from the work of Paul Lehrer, a Professor of Psychiatry at the Robert Wood Johnson medical school, New Jersey, USA.
In 2002 Lehrer had published a research paper titled “Psychology Aspects of Asthma” which was published in The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, which Veeramanikantan is said to have copied from.
Veeramanikantan however, has denied the charges saying that he had quoted Lehrer’s work and had been “duely acknowledged” in the bibliography.
Pondicherry University
Pondicherry University Teachers’ Association has written to HRD Minister Smriti Irani asking for the removal of the Vice-Chancellor Chandra Krishnamurthy, alleging that the latter had published a book on the legal education in India with many chapters being copies of research papers written by scholars in law. Krishnamurthy had reportedly mentioned the book Legal Education in India in her CV along with two other books. The allegations came to light earlier this week.
Jadavpur University
The calls for the removal of Vice Chancellor of Jadavpur University Abhijit Chakrabarti have just grown stronger with allegations of plagiarism being levelled against him by the teachers’ association last month. Chakrabarti has reportedly published a paper called “Implementation of Genetic Algorithm and Modified Shuffled Frog Leaping Algorithm for Transmission Loss Minimum Re-scheduling” with some portions copied from another article authored by scholars at the Taiwan University in 2011. Chakrabarti’s paper was presented at the 2011 INDICON, the annual conference of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Karnataka State Open University
Vice Chancellor of Karnataka of the university Professor K S Rangappa, has been accused of plagiarising an Osmania University research paper published in 2009.
Rangappa has been accused of plagiarizing from the research paper titled “Kinetics of oxidation of adenosine by tert-butoxyl radicals: Protection and repair by chlorogenic acid” published by Indian journal Indian Journal of Biochemistry and Biophysics on October 2009. The paper had been authored by G Vijayalakshmi, M Adinarayana and P Jayaprakash Rao.
Within a year, Rangappa got the paper published in an international journal called the Journal of Physical Organic Chemistry (Europe) in its April 2010 edition. However, his name, and the names of two others MN Kumara and DG Bhadregowda appeared as along with the names of the original authors of the research paper.
Bangalore University
M Venkataramanappa, a research scholar at Bangalore University’s (BU) Department of Sociology had been awarded a PhD in 2003. However, it turned out that he had reproduced around 100 pages from his own guide’s research in his own work.