ROURKELA: The long-pending controversial decision of awarding doctoral degree to a PhD student of National Institute of Technology - Rourkela (NIT-R), facing allegation of academic dishonesty, has come to haunt the reputed institute again.
The 66th senate meeting was held on Monday evening under the leadership of new NIT-R Director Prof.Animesh Biswal, who is additionally holding the post of the Chairman of the Board of Governors (BoG) after the ouster of the previous chairperson Vasantha Ramaswamy in August. The meeting gave assent to allow the PhD student for viva-voce examination at the earliest, although a section of the senate members were opposed to it. The decision came after the Students Grievance Redressal Cell (SGRC) of the NIT Council recommended for it. Reacting on the decision, the former NIT-R Director Prof.SK Sarangi said academic ethics are getting ceremonially cremated in NIT-R.
He also accused the present administration of showing ‘undue’ hurry and suppressing facts. Prof.Sarangi said the external examiner Prof P C Pandey of IIT, Bombay was not presented with the complete thesis of the student for evaluation. Pointing to academic dishonesty of the student, Prof.Sarangi claimed that he first tried to pass on his previous work done at Kharagpur IIT as a part of his PhD work at NIT-R. When detected, the said student added new material on molecular pathway. But, again his main results presented as two figures on “oxidative stress” and “circadian exercise” were found to be published works of others in 2007. Those figures are available in wikipathways.com, Prof.Sarangi added.
As per PhD regulations, doctoral scrutiny committee (DSC) is appointed by Senate, not BOG and appointment of Prof.SK Patra to head the DSC by removing the previous DSC chief by the sacked chairperson then was in violations of rules and illegal. The present Director did not respond to calls.