Chandra Krishnamurthy, the erstwhile Vice-Chancellor of National Law University Orissa & currently the Vice-Chancellor of Pondicherry University is the latest in the series of academics who have been accused of plagiarism. Earlier this month, Deepak Pental (Ex- Vice Chancellor of Delhi University) & Abhijit Chakrabarti (Vice- Chancellor of Jadavpur University) were accused of plagiarism. This makes Krishnamurthy the third academic in India to be accused of plagiarism in a single month. It is alleged that Krishnamurthy in her book, ‘Legal…

Ex- Vice Chancellor of Delhi University, Deepak Pental, was recently sent to jail by a city court over charges of plagiarism and forgery. The complaint had been filed by professor P Parthasarthy, who had accused Pental and a PhD student of plagiarizing his paper on biotechnology and publishing it as their own in 2000-2002. Subsequently, the additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate had ordered Pental’s arrest under section 63 of the Copyright Act, 1957 (section 63 provides for prosecution for infringement of…

Chetan Bhagat has run into copyright trouble over his latest book ‘Half Girlfriend’; the author has been sued by Dr. Birbal Jha, an English scholar from Bihar, who claims that Chetan Bhagat stole the story for Half Girlfriend from his play ‘Englishia Boli’. The complainant is a Director of British Lingua, a spoken English institute in Patna. Dr. Jha claims that Chetan Bhagat had visited his institute in Bihar earlier this year and had watched a performance of the play….