BHUBANESWAR: Problems for Sambalpur University Vice-Chancellor (VC) Sanjiv Mittal are far from over. Mittal, facing abetment of suicide charges over the death of a contractual staff, now finds himself accused of providing incorrect information about his scholarly achievements in his application for the VC post.
A group of persons including ex-senate members of Sambalpur University, lawyers and social activists have filed a complaint with Chancellor and Governor Prof Ganeshi Lal, alleging that Mittal has not provided correct and relevant information about his scholarly achievements (contribution to journals and authoring books) in his application for the VC post which he submitted on December 10, 2020.
Mittal, with 31 years of teaching experience in business management behind him, was appointed as the VC of the university in January. In the application, Mittal mentioned that he has authored eight books indexed in Scopus - a bibliographic database containing abstracts and citations for academic journal articles.
However, the ex-senate members alleged that Mittal has not mentioned whether the books are authored by him or are co-authored or joint-authoured. Besides, there is no mention of the title of books or names of the publishers, year of publication and total number of pages.
"This amounts to suppression of facts," the complainants said. They further alleged that Mittal had mentioned that he has 111 publications to his credit but provided information of only 25 publications which he claimed were published by Scopus/SCI (Scientific Citation Indexing) journals.
On scrutiny, only 4 articles were found indexed in Scopus and the rest in SCI/ESCI (Emerging Sources Citation Index).
“During the appointment of a VC, it is the Higher Education department that scrutinises a candidate’s application/documents and submits it to the search committee appointed by the Chancellor. Publication in Scopus and SCI/ESCI is considered high quality. In this case, the search committee took it in good faith that the applicant’s documents might have been scrutinised. However, now the allegations levelled against Mittal have been found true”, said a search committee member, requesting anonymity.
The complainants demanded an impartial inquiry into this by the Chancellor. The VC, however, refuted the allegations. Stating that the allegations are baseless, Mittal said that he will respond when he is asked to officially. Prior to his appointment as VC, he was working at University School of Management Studies of Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University.