Copied content in PhD thesis can now cost students their registration as well. UGC's new anti-plagiarism policy allows up to 10% content similarity. With similarity above it, students will be asked to withdraw the manuscript. The policy which was drafted in 2017 has finally been approved by the HRD Ministry. Academicians will be denied one annual increment for similarities within 40%-60% and for plagiarized content with above 60% similarity they shall not be allowed to be a supervisor to any new Master's, M.Phil., Ph.D. Student/scholar for a period of three years.
The new regulation known as University Grants Commission (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations, 2018 shall apply to the students, faculty, researchers and staff of higher educational institutions.
Students, faculties and researchers will be trained for using a plagiarism detection tool, approved by the University. In June at Shirdi, briefing the reporters about the importance of anti-plagiarism tools, HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar had said that, 'one person's Ph.D. thesis has been wrongly used by some others to complete their theses. As such cases are on the rise, we have decided to use software such as 'Turnitin' and others to keep a check on such theses.'
In another development earlier this week in Rajya Sabha Satya Pal Singh, Minister of State for Human Resource Development, informed that in the past three years, three cases of plagiarism in writing Ph.D thesis have been found by UGC. 'The UGC has informed that three cases have come to their notice in last three years against Chandra Krishnamurthy, vice chancellor of Pondicherry University (2015); Anil Kumar Upadhyay, reader of Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapeeth, Varanasi (2017); and Vinay Kumar Pathak, vice chancellor of Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Technical University, Lucknow (2018),' he told the Parliament.
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