Plagiarism norms tightened by UGC. Similar content above 10% to cause problems

According to the new Plagiarism norms by UGC, Similar content in PhD thesis above 10% can now cost students their registration. The new UGC policy allows similarity of up to 10%. The students will have to withdraw their manuscripts if the similarity is found above 10%. The HRD ministry has finally given approval to this policy which was drafted in 2017. For similarities between 40%-60%, annual increments for academicians will be rejected and if the plagiarized content is found above 60%, they will not be given the permission to supervise any new student of Master’s, Ph.D., and M.Phil. for a period of three years. This newly approved policy known as the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations, 2018 will be applicable for all the students, staff, faculty and researchers of Higher Education Institutes. Training will be given to the students, researchers and faculties for using plagiarism detection software approved by the university. Prakash Javadekar, HRD minister said that PhD. The thesis of one person has been copied by some other person to complete their thesis, to avoid such cases of plagiarism, various softwares can be used by all the colleges and universities. Earlier this week, Satya Pal Singh, Minister of state HRD, informed the Rajya Sabha that in the past three years, UGC has found three cases of plagiarism in writing PhD thesis. He told the parliament that three cases of plagiarism were found by UGC in the last three years against Vinay Kumar Pathak, vice chancellor of Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Technical University, Lucknow (2018) , Anil Kumar Upadhyay, reader of Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapeeth, Varanasi (2017) and Chandra Krishnamurthy, vice chancellor of Pondicherry University (2015)