Tuesday, January 28, 2020

TN’s PHD factories

TNN | Jan 28, 2020, 04.47 AM IST


CHENNAI: Who says you need critical thinking and academic acumen to earn a PhD? You can order a doctorate with just a phone call. The cartels that employ ghost writers no more operate on the sly. They’ve set it up like restaurants – there’s a menu and what you pay depends on what you order.

Tamil Nadu produced the maximum number of PhDs in the country, 5,844, in 2018, according to All India Survey for Higher Education 2019. There is a renewed interest among faculty members to publish research papers and complete doctorates due to the Union HRD ministry’s decision to make PhD mandatory for the entry-level post of assistant professor from July 2021, and give more weightage for research work in National Institute Ranking Framework rankings and National Assessment and Accreditation Council ratings.

The spike in research interest has made the ground fertile for ghost writers and agents who have branded themselves consultancy services. Scholars and research guides TOI spoke to said they received calls from unknown people offering ‘help’ in doing research. TOI picked the trail of one such message to uncover how a racket has been functioning in a sophisticated but brazen manner.

Posing as a faculty member from a private engineering college, this correspondent called the agent. He promptly asked about the area of research and topic before quoting a price. He offered to do engineering research, analyse data and publish a paper in an annexure-1 journal for

`1.2 lakh. For converting research into an article and publishing it in the journal he quoted `80,000.

“If you can do research and only need help in publication, it will cost `45,000. But, your research should be complete research with analysis, data and graphics. You should take responsibility if the paper is rejected or needs clarification from journal editors,” he said.

Asked about outsourcing thesis work, the agent said, “If you have the literature review, research work, article, output and analysis, we will charge `65,000 to write the thesis. If you have nothing, then it would cost around

`3 lakh. We will do the research, get the article published and write the thesis.”

The agent said a team of professors does the research for money. His ‘agency’ is helping scholars across universities. “The rate will be finalised after seeing the university guidelines. We collect the highest rate for Anna University PhDs,” he said.

The payment is in installments. “We will collect registration fee initially and take full payment after the acceptance by the research journal. For example, we will take `10,000 as initial payment for publication and update you about the research. You can make corrections. We will take the next installment after your corrections,” he said.

Faculty members TOI spoke to confirmed that outsourcing research work is a trend thriving in arts and science colleges, and technical colleges.

“It has become mandatory to publish research papers for increments. Journals take up to a year to accept an article or even to respond. So faculty members opt to publish research papers by paying money. When we pay money, even some of the listed journals respond within a day confirming publication without any proper peer review,” said a faculty member from an arts and science college in the city.

Professors from University of Madras said one of the reasons why such rackets flourish is because students without research aptitude enrolled for PhDs.

Professor M K Surappa, vice-chancellor of Anna University, said the practice was “unethical and devoid of all morality”. “Research is a passion and not a routine degree. This is perhaps one of the reasons why our country is not able to produce high quality research publications in sufficient numbers,” he said. To deter such PhDs, Anna University has introduced minimum eligibility marks in entrance exam for aspirants. This brought down the number of PhD candidates from 2,527 in 2018 to 908 in 2019.

University of Madras has introduced measures to enhance the quality of PhD thesis in the past two years. “All theses have to pass through a plagiarism detecting software. There is a new online system to trace the progress of research work very closely. A first year candidate has to present a paper in at least one national-level conference and in the second year one conference and one publication, and it continues for the third year also. If the candidate meets these requirements then he or she can prepare the thesis,” said P Duraisamy, vice-chancellor.

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