Declaring retractions is a small step towards accountability in Indian HE

The announcement that scientists in India will be required to declare whether any of their papers have been retracted when applying for grants is a welcome indication that the country is finally starting to hold academics and institutions accountable for dubious practices.

Playing fast and loose with data is a particular problem in private universities, whose numbers have surged exponentially over the past decade or so. In 2010-11, there were 87 private universities in the country; by 2025, their numbers had grown more than fivefold, to 510.

Each year, private universities compete intensely with each other and with public universities for new students. One common strategy they pursue to be noticed by potential applicants is to spend heavily on advertisements – via newspapers, television, billboards and social media.

Other than provide information on courses offered and deadlines for admission, the advertisements highlight a number of other factors likely to appeal to would-be students. These include graduate employment and salary data, claims about the quality of campus infrastructure, and boasts about the university’s national and international rankings, as well as its grade from the National Accreditation Council of India (NAAC), the leading government body for assessing higher education institutions.

In many – or perhaps even most – cases, however, the information provided is misleading or outright false.

Private universities advertise spurious claims because there are no consequences for doing so. India’s higher education sector is over-regulated but also poorly regulated. There are multiple oversight bodies but few are consistently effective. In particular, there are no effective regulations or regulatory bodies in place to call out and penalise false claims, such as “100 per cent placements” for graduates, or the possession of “world-class laboratories”. The University Grants Commission (UGC), the leading regulatory body in Indian higher education, only penalises the bottom-feeding higher education institutions that fail to comply with public self-disclosure rules.

Frustrated by the lack of government action, some people are taking it upon themselves to expose misleading claims by private universities and to call for appropriate action. One recent example is Maheshwar Peri, the founder and CEO of the @Careers360 education platform. He took to social media to decry the fact that while India has strong and effective regulatory protections for the smallest stock market investors, families who spend large sums, sometimes even their life savings, on college education have to do so in a virtually entirely unregulated information environment. Peri called on the government to enforce a mandatory “disclosure standard” on universities and colleges to protect the interests of students.

But even that might not be enough to prevent families from wasting their money because private universities do not even need to resort to false advertising. They can obtain respectable NAAC grades and university rankings by fraudulent means.

For example, many private universities submit false data to NAAC and university ranking bodies on the number of teachers they have in order to project a good student-teacher ratio. NAAC officials are mandated to verify the data submitted to them, but there have been reports of some officials being bribed to award universities higher-than-deserved grades.

In recent years, since university rankings became ubiquitous and the government mandated universities and faculty to increase their publication counts in order to improve their positions, cheating these metrics has become the latest game in town. And methods have evolved from plagiarism and publishing in predatory journals to publishing fake research in genuine journals, typically using research paper mills and sophisticated global networks.

Private universities are not the only culprits: public universities and their faculty, too, are guilty of such malpractice. But the stakes are far higher for private universities, which, having no public grants, are more dependent on student recruitment for their survival.

Over the past couple of years, Achal Agrawal, a France-educated data scientist who first taught at a couple of private universities, has regularly exposed research fraud in his social media posts and in newspaper writings. The founder of India Research Watch (IRW), Agrawal was recently included in Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2025.

Up until now, government officials have indicated little interest in addressing the problems that he highlights. And India’s regulatory bodies have pretended that research fraud is not widespread or that it doesn’t matter.

However, perhaps the efforts of Peri, Agrawal and others are starting to have an impact. This week, the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), the country’s premier science funder, announced that applicants to its Advanced Research Grant will have to declare any retractions of their papers in the past five years and explain the reasons for them. Submissions will also be checked for plagiarism.

However, there is still a very long way to go before Indian HE’s information environment is cleansed of all the various forms of pollution. In the meantime, the hundreds of thousands of young people preparing for another college admissions season must wade through a swamp of misleading claims.

Pushkar is director of the International Centre Goa.