One article by Somesh Kumar Mathur has copied the entirety of a paper by Jean Drèze. His other work also includes several instances of plagiarism.

The faculty building at IIT Kanpur. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

New Delhi: Somesh Kumar Mathur, an associate professor of economics at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, has been found to have plagiarised extensively in his academic writings.

Mathur’s plagiarism first came to light after economist Jean Drèze noticed that one of Mathur’s published articles was almost exactly the same as one he had written and published in the Economic and Political Weekly in April 2000 entitled ‘Militarism, Development and Democracy’. Mathur published his article, ‘Casualities of Militarization in the Contemporary World: Democracy and Development’ in the journal Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy in 2001.

When put through the plagiarism-checking tool Copyscape, 98% of Mathur’s article (including the bibliography) was similar to Drèze’s. A section on Kashmir that did not figure in Drèze’s paper had been added.

As is the case with several instances of academic plagiarism still rampant in Indian academia, this wasn’t the only time Mathur used someone else’s work as his own. In 2002, he published a review of Gautam Gupta, Manash Ranjan Gupta and Bhaswar Moitra’s Issues in Development Economics entitled ‘Policies and Markets’ in the Economic and Political Weekly. The last paragraph of this review is taken verbatim from the introduction of Debraj Ray’s Development Economics, published by Princeton University Press.