Achal Agrawal founded the India Research Watch (IRW) after his observations of grave academic misconduct in India. Dr. Agrawal, now a freelance data scientist in Raipur, told scientific journal Nature how shocked he was when a student spoke casually of using software to publish his work. This amounts to plagiarism, Dr. Agrawal said, but the student insisted his work had passed the university’s plagiarism checks. Now a part of Nature ’s 10 – a list of people “who shaped science in 2025” compiled by the journal – Dr. Agrawal spoke to The Hindu about why he decided to quit his university job and devote his time to driving the discourse on research misconduct in India.

India ranks third, after China and the U.S., for publication retraction numbers. Is academic misconduct such as plag

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