Plagiarism: government for action against PVC

Following an inquiry which concluded that there is up to 63 percentage plagiarism in the doctoral thesis of V. Veeramanikantan, Pro Vice Chancellor of the University of Kerala, the State government has written to the Vice Chancellor of the University of Calicut to take appropriate action on the matter.

Dr. Veeramanikantan has a doctorate from the University of Calicut for a thesis in Psychology. Now, it would be up to the Senate of the University—the degree awarding body—to take a call on this.

The initial complaint on this issue was by R.S. Sasikumar, former syndicate member of the University of Kerala. In September 2014, Mr. Sasikumar had written to the Education Minister raising the charge of plagiarism in the said thesis. He claimed that a plagiarism-detection software had detected a high degree of similarities—of the order of 60 percent—between the thesis and other published material, including those on the web.

Inquiry held

Subsequently the Vice Chancellor of the University of Calicut was asked to institute an inquiry by an academic from outside the State. The said inquiry by N.K. Chadha from Delhi University concluded that the introduction to the thesis contained material copied from internet sources, research papers, publications and student papers. There was plagiarism of 60 per cent in this chapter. In the second chapter on ‘Literature’ the report concludes that ‘majority of the text in chapter two has been taken from previous research publications amounting to 57 per cent of total plagiarised content used within this chapter of the thesis.’

17% similarity

The synopsis of the thesis has 17 per cent similarity with a paper submitted by a student to Delhi University, the report notes.

The third chapter on methodology has a similarity index of 53 per cent. This means that nearly 50 percent of the text in this chapter is duplicated from the internet. Wikipedia, www.reference.com , www.bionity.com and rmgh.net are the chief resources. However chapter four ‘results and interpretation’ was ‘originally written by the author of the thesis.’ The similarity index was only seven per cent and the content that was plagiarised was irrelevant.

Dr. Veeramanikantan when contacted denied all allegations of plagiarism and contended that he had given proper references to all sourced material.