Report on plagiarism charges presented before IIT-K board

In October 2009,IIT-K Director Sanjay Govind Dhande had constituted a three-member fact-finding committee to probe into the plagiarism charges. Following the report of the fact-finding committee,the Director had issued a showcause notice to Associate Professor Ashok Kumar. After the reply received from Kumar,the matter was presented before the BOG on Saturday.

IIT-K Director did not respond to the various telephone calls made to him. Whereas,IIT-K Registrar and Ex-Officio Secretary to BOG,Sanjeev S Kashalkar,denied having any information about the important meeting.

When contacted,one of the BOG members told The Indian Express: “We have clear instructions not to interact with the media.”

The 10-member BOG for IIT-K is headed by M Anandkrishnan. In addition to IIT-K Director Dhande,the BOG also includes Ashok Thakur,Additional Secretary,Government of India,N K Sinha,Joint Secretary,Government of India,Professor R G Harshe,Professor D V Singh,Former V-C,Roorkee University,Professor R S Nirjar,Professor I D Dhariyal,Professor Rajiv Shekhar and Sanjeev S Kashalkar,who is former Ex-Officio Secretary to BOG.

A review journal had reportedly retracted two research papers from IIT-K on the ground of alleged plagiarism. It was detected that review papers on “Microbial production of dihydroxyacetone” by Ashok Kumar,Ruchi Mishra and Seema Rani Jain had plagiarized content from Wikipedia and StateMaster.com. The review paper “Molecular imprinting in sol-gel matrix” of Ashok Kumar and Radha Gupta carried text from five different contents.