Achal Agrawal, founder of India Research Watch. | Photo credit: Special arrangement
Achal Agrawal founded India Research Watch (IRW) after his observations of serious academic misconduct in India. Dr. Agrawal, now a freelance data scientist in Raipur, told the science journal Nature how he was shocked when a student casually talked about using the software to publish his work. This amounts to plagiarism, said Dr. Agrawal, but the student insisted that his work had passed the university’s plagiarism checks. Now part of Nature’s 10—the magazine’s list of people “who will shape science in 2025″—Dr. Agrawal spoke to The Hindu about why he decided to leave his university job to devote his time to leading a discourse on research misconduct in India.
India ranks third after China and the US in terms of publication downloads. Is academic misconduct like plagiarism not taken seriously in Indian academia?
India is actually in second place since 2022. Downloads from India have skyrocketed since 2022. Even the percentage of articles downloaded has seen a sharp increase. It is true that even revealed cases of misconduct are not taken seriously. We know of cases with more than 30 tampering appeals that have been awarded and awarded in a premier institute in India.
The University Grants Commission (UGC) guidelines stipulate a very minimal penalty even if someone is found to have plagiarized 60% of the content. Other forms of misconduct such as data manipulation are not even mentioned in the UGC guidelines. Most countries also have central “research integrity authorities” that investigate and follow up cases of misconduct. There is no such authority in India and the investigation is left to institutes that have a vested interest in allowing their researchers to continue using the acronyms.
In what ways is software being used unethically to aid published work?
The biggest problem now is the use of gen AI to generate fake data, documents and reviews. Before gen AI, many people also used paraphrasing software to avoid being caught for plagiarism. They would take existing papers, run them through the software, and then check if the percentage of plagiarism was below a threshold. Many such papers were then submitted, reviewed and accepted without anyone reading them. They contain amusing artifacts of paraphrasing: “big data” becomes “colossal information” and “artificial intelligence becomes counterfeit consciousness, for example.” A lot of image manipulation is also done using popular image editing software, but there are increasingly sophisticated tools for detecting image manipulation.
Why did you feel it was necessary to leave university work to accelerate this discourse?
Working at a university makes this job difficult to do because it creates a lot of conflicts of interest as well as pressures from the university itself. But I didn’t leave university just for this job. I have also volunteered at a government school in Uttarakhand.
However, not being in the university system gave me the freedom to do this work without any conflicts of interest or institutional pressures. I was lucky enough to also do some freelance projects as a data scientist which helped me with my finances.
How easy is it to prove wrongdoing?
Most of the cases being caught right now are really lazy researchers doing a shoddy job of hiding unethical artifacts in their work. The smart ones prove much more difficult, especially when in some cases it requires the cooperation and coordination of several authorities.
On average, withdrawals occur two years after publication, which shows how rigorous the withdrawal process is. Many problematic papers flagged by detectives are still not retracted even after clear evidence of problems with the paper. Plagiarism detection software as well as AI gene detection software are not reliable and cannot be considered as evidence. Also, many paraphrases escape detection.
The National Indian Institutional Ranking (NIRF) now raises institutions if several articles published by their researchers have been retracted. What else needs to be done?
A withdrawal penalty is a necessary step to quickly control this problem. However, this is only treating the symptoms and ignoring the root cause, which in this case is faulty metrics in the NIRF itself, which has led to an excessive focus on publication statistics. There is an urgent need to review the NIRF to make it much more robust and transparent.
For example, we don’t know which college received how many fines this year, so the punishment is unobservable and therefore ineffective. Also, due to too much focus on research, education has really taken a back seat in higher education. Many professors cut back on teaching to spend more time on research because that is what is measured and rewarded.
Tell us more about the portal you’ve created where whistleblowers can anonymously report violations.
Many people are only willing to talk about problems anonymously because they legitimately fear retribution for whistleblowing. That’s why we provide this feature on our portal where one of the intentions is anonymous. The person in question has the option to provide an anonymous e-mail in case they wish to establish contact. We get about 10 tips a day, but many of them are quite generic in nature, asking to see a certain profile, or are clearly vendetta based on the language of the complaint. Some complaints are genuine which we track and sometimes post through our handle.
However, the ‘Research Integrity Office’ will be in a much better position to deal with these complaints as it will have the power to actually follow them up and do something about it.
Now you are facing a lawsuit from a private university…
Yes, there was a civil defamation suit filed against IRW that is still pending. The preliminary applications were disposed of on December 8 and a copy of the order is now awaited.
Published – 12 Dec 2025 18:44 IST
