Achal Agrawal founded the India Research Watch (IRW) after his observations of grave academic misconduct in India. Dr. Agrawal, now a freelance data scientist in Raipur, told scientific journal Nature how shocked he was when a student spoke casually of using software to publish his work. This amounts to plagiarism, Dr. Agrawal said, but the student insisted his work had passed the university’s plagiarism checks. Now a part of Nature’s 10 – a list of people “who shaped science in 2025” compiled by the journal – Dr. Agrawal spoke toThe Hindu about why he decided to quit his university job and devote his time to driving the discourse on research misconduct in India.

India actually ranks second since 2022. The number of retractions from India has skyrocketed since 2022. Even the percentage of articles getting retracted has seen a sharp increase. It’s true that even the discovered cases for misconduct are not taken seriously. We know of cases with more than 30 retractions due to manipulation being felicitated and awarded in a premier Indian Institute.

University Grants Commission (UGC) guidelines stipulate very minimal penalty even if someone is found having plagiarised 60% of the content. Other forms of misconduct like data manipulation are not even mentioned in the UGC guidelines. Also, most countries have central ‘Research Integrity Offices’ that investigate and follow up on cases of misconduct. In India such an office does not exist and the investigations are left to the institutes, which have a vested interest in letting their researchers continue to use shortcuts.