New Delhi: The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the apex body responsible for guiding the country’s biomedical response to the coronavirus pandemic, has been accused of plagiarism, with a new policy document published by it lifting as much as 37% of its content from unattributed sources– a portion considered substantial by all standards.But for the seriousness of the charge, it only joins a pile of concerns about the ICMR’s ethical conduct since March, when India’s COVID-19 outbreak turned serious.A complaint was lodged anonymously with the Union health minister Harsh Vardhan on June 12, and a copy was shared with The Wire as well as with a secretary at the health ministry, the Directorate General of Health Services and the director-general ICMR.The document – called ICMR’s Disabilities Guidance Document in short – appears to have lifted multiple passages from previously published work, including research papers, information websites like those of the WHO and from institutional websites like those of NIMHANS and AIIMS.Its preparation was supervised by Raman R. Gangakhedkar, the chief epidemiologist at ICMR. It was conceived, “edited and compiled” by scientists Ravinder Singh, Sumit Aggarwal and Heena Tabassum. It was published sometime last month.According to a ‘similarity report’ compiled using an online tool called iThenticate, the document had plagiarised 9,046 words in all – amounting to 37% of the text – in 106 different chunks. The biggest chunk is of 1,193 words from the WHO website.As it happens, Harsh Vardhan was elected the chairman of the World Health Assembly’s executive board in May. The assembly is the international forum through which the WHO’s members govern the WHO.The complaint asked that Vardhan initiate a probe if the charge of plagiarism was borne out, even as the complainant pointed to specific structural provisions that might help.“To ensure the image of ICMR does not get tarnished, secretary of Department of Health Research and director general of ICMR set up a Research Integrity Unit in the division of human resource development, ICMR headquarters, New Delhi, in 2019,” the complainant wrote.ICMR also requires all institutes in its purview to have a research integrity officer (RIO), whose job it is to ensure all official documents, including research papers, originating from each institute to be free of research misconduct. This typically takes the form of an undertaking that the authors of each document have to sign.Whether this practice has the desired effect is hard to say, considering numerous government academic institutes in India have been embroiled in multiple plagiarism and misconduct controversies. For example, a year ago this month, the Indian Institute of Toxicology Research, Lucknow, came under the scanner after 130 papers published by its researchers were found to have used spurious images to hold up the results of research. The institute is a laboratory under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research.Also read: UGC’s New Ethics Course for PhD Students Is Welcome but Not Good EnoughThe complainant in the present case also noted the gravity of the situation considering ICMR is responsible for ensuring other institutes whose conduct it oversees don’t plagiarise content themselves.“ICMR is a body framing national ethical guidelines in research. It is their responsibility to act on their own plagiarism to send a consistent message to researchers and policymakers, that as the premier research institute of this country they will hold themselves to the same standards that they expect of other researchers,” the complainant’s note stated.The complaint also reminded minister Vardhan that “the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations 2018, in clause 12.2, prescribes penalties in case of plagiarism in academic and research publications.”These rules stipulate that documents that “plagiarism in academic and research publications” to the extent of 10-40% warrant the withdrawal of the manuscript.Finally, the complainant asked for exemplary punishment against confirmed offenders and for the respective institutes they are affiliated with to initiate independent action.Dr Aggarwal, one of the scientists who conceived, edited and compiled the report, is a member of the ICMR’s research group on operational research under the National Task Force (OR-NTF) on COVID-19. On June 16, a preprint paper coauthored by Dr Aggarwal, as well as Narendra Kumar Arora, the chairperson of the OR-NTF, was involved in a different controversy. The study described in the paper suggested India’s COVID-19 case load would only peak in late 2020. But while many of the paper’s authors are affiliated with ICMR and the paper also acknowledged funding from the body, ICMR itself said it hadn’t funded the study and distanced itself from the conclusions.Anant Bhan, a bioethics expert, had said, “If ICMR say they did not fund the study, and the authors claim it was funded by ICMR, and ICMR claims its scientist who is a co-author was not aware of the manuscript, this is a gross publication ethics issue. So who is right?”A rights activist said ICMR should urgently refrain from questionable practices, especially when it could simply have attributed the content it copied in the report to their original sources.Also read: Doubts Reign Over Study With ICMR Ties That Put India’s COVID Peak in Late 2020Incidentally, this report was the subject of discussion among disability rights activists last month. While they were impressed at first with the volume of work, their concerns eventually came to focus on the fact that none of the persons involved in drafting the report was from the disability sector.@ICMRDELHI has produced a Guidance Document for Health System Response for Persons with #Disabilities & Functional Impairment during #COVID19 WITHOUT involving a single health professional with disability or disability rights organisations. #NothingAboutUsWithoutUs @ProfBhargava pic.twitter.com/Nn7AiG0Gzp— Satendra Singh, MD (@drsitu) May 22, 2020Sangeeta Sharma, a professor and head of paediatrics at the National Institute of Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases, New Delhi, noted that the OR-NTF – which recommended the report – needed to “include persons with disability for fairness and equality of justice”.Emails to the offices of the health minister, the ministry secretary, the ICMR director general and the Directorate General of Health Services hadn’t elicited a reply at the time of publishing. The article will be updated if and when they do.Update, 6:52 pm, June 19, 2020: Rajni Kant Srivastava, the head of research management, policy, planning and biomedical communication at ICMR, replied to The Wire‘s email asking about whether the body will act on the allegation with the following statement: “ICMR has not come out with any such document.” In response to a follow-up question, he said:This is malicious news. A preliminary guidance note is still under discussion/consideration by drawing upon the existing evidence before being finalised and placed on our website. Eminent experts have been consulted to prepare this note of immense public health importance on health care preparedness with focus on disability in the time of COVID-19. The referred note has neither been approved nor released by a competent authority [and] is also not available in public domain. Therefore the issue of plagiarism does not feel relevant and remains unfounded.Vasudevan Mukunth, science editor of The Wire, responds: The document is available in the public domain at least from one state government website, in this case that of the office of the state commissioner for persons with disabilities, Bihar, and doesn’t mention the word ‘preliminary’. Second, there are lists of contributors and editors at the end of the document, and Dr Srivastava also says “eminent experts [were] consulted to prepare this note of immense public health importance”. So even as an internal guidance report – though that doesn’t seem to be the case – statements in the document should have been attributed to their original sources.
