HEC forms new commission to probe ED’s plagiarism

Islamabad: Higher Education Commission (HEC) is trying to give another chance to Executive Director of HEC Dr Arshad Ali and has made another commission to probe his alleged plagiarism in his research paper.

According to sources the previous committee which was formed by HEC former chairman Dr Mukhtar Ahmed has already declared HEC Executive Director Dr Arshad Ali as guilty. Sources in HEC told that Dr Arshad Ali was appointed as executive director of HEC in January 2016 is using three official vehicles of registration numbers GX-292, GAC-112 and GAC-111.

Since his appointment the ED has availed four foreign official visits of different countries and got more than $15,000 in return. New management of HEC has assigned the matter to newly formed 10-member Commission and has given more chance to Dr Arshad Ali to get maximum benefits from the department, because as HEC policy, if most of the paper have been exactly copied from any published work of other people without giving the reference to the original work, a major penalty of dismissal from service could be imposed.

In December last year Dr Ali was alleged for sealing 88 percent research work of his co-authored research paper from another publication. The paper titled “A Taxonomy and Survey of Grid Resource Planning and Reservation Systems for Grid Enabled Analysis Environment,” published in July 2004, found with heavy plagiarism when it had been tested in Turnitin, a software which has been officially provided by HEC to the universities to check the similarity index and plagiarism in the degrees as well as research papers of the scholars.

According to the Turnitin report, the accused copied most part in his paper from a paper titled ‘Survey and Taxonomy of Grid Resource Management Systems’ authored by Chaitanya Kandagatla University of Texas, Austin America in February 2004.

As per HEC Act 2002, the ED is the second most important post of the commission being the principal accounting officer of the body that manages around Rs100 billion annual budgets. He/she acts as head of HEC Secretariat and also as the Secretary of the Commission’s governing body which makes policies on improving quality of education and fighting plagiarism. Despite passage of over 8 months the matter is still under the carpet. Academic circles linked hopes with Dr Tariq Banuri who assumed office in May for taking some sort of action against ED to set precedent so that at least such senior official of the commission would not dare to involve themselves in such academic corruption.

The HEC website defines plagiarist as the “one who steals the thoughts or writings of others and gives them out as his own”. It also bans self-plagiarism and verbatim copying portions of another author’s paper or from reports by citing but not clearly differentiating what text has been copied.

When ‘The News’ contacted HEC Dr Tariq Banuri to get his official version he said we assigned the new commission to re-investigate the matter impartially. “The due action would be taken in accordance with the commission findings”, he wowed adding that the yet he don’t know the facts and to take action mere on assumptions and allegations is not possible.