Mashelkar admits to plagiarism in report

MUMBAI: Renowned scientist R A Mashelkar finally admitted that the report submitted by the committee headed by himself on ‘patentability of drugs’ on December 29, 2006, to the government was plagiarised.

He said the reproduction of the lines from a document could have been made by the initial sub-group of the committee and was overlooked.

DNA Money had, on February 13, reported that Mashelkar had allegedly plagiarised from a study.

On Thursday, Mashelkar, said that he had learnt that about 10-12 lines in the committee’s report were a verbatim reproduction from a paper published by the Intellectual Property Institute of the Oxford University.

In a letter on February 19, the panel requested the government to withdraw the report for re-examination. Meanwhile, the CPI (M) has demanded that the committee’s report on patent law should be discarded.