Sorry State of India's Doctoral Programmes

Some years ago and a few weeks after I had assumed charge as the Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University, I received a sealed letter from a sitting judge of the Supreme Court of India.

- BY INVITATION Dinesh Singh

The venerable justice had discovered unabashed plagiarism in a doctoral dissertation in the discipline of law that had been submitted to him in his capacity as an official examiner. There are several issues that arose for me in the context of the judge’s complaint. To begin with, what was the supervisor of the doctoral candidate doing? In this case, he was a fairly senior professor. It was apparent that he had been utterly careless. Then there was the matter of the doctoral student. What had prompted him to indulge in such a blatant act of plagiarism? However, as I discovered over time, this was not a isolated incident. During the course of my tenure, I kept coming across cases of shoddy doctoral dissertations where the external examiners had taken pains to be