CORNELL AND HARVARD UNIVERSITIES "PLAGIARIZED" INDIAN ARVIND KUMAR's WORK

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CORNELL UNIVERSITY and HARVARD UNIVERSITY "PLAGIARIZED" INDIAN HINDU
ARVIND KUMAR's WORK and CLAIMED AS THEIR OWN.

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https://intellectualkshatriya.com/plagiarism-by-cornell-harvard-and-nature-delhis-smoke-season-and-monsanto-what-is-the-connection/

Plagiarism By Cornell, Harvard And Nature, Delhi's Smoke Season And
Monsanto. What Is The Connection ?

Arvind Kumar

In December 2017, I published an article entitled ‘Law aiding Monsanto
is reason for Delhi’s annual smoke season‘ in the Delhi based newspaper
Sunday Guardian. The article explained why the Delhi metropolitan region
had been blanketed by smoke from burning fields in Punjab every November
since 2009.

Although farmers in Punjab had been burning the residue of their paddy
crop in order to clear their fields in preparation for the wheat season
for several decades, Delhi started facing the severe problem only in
recent years.

After researching the issue, I was able to link the phenomenon to a law
passed in 2009 by Punjab and Haryana and came up with the explanation
that the laws in the two states had triggered a chain reaction leading
to Delhi being covered by smoke. The laws in the two states forced
farmers to delay the planting of rice crops until June. This delay in
planting led to a delay in the harvest of rice which had a 120-day cycle
from sowing to harvest. The delay in harvest in turn led to a delay in
farmers burning their fields. The burning now took place after the
monsoon season had ended when the direction of wind had changed and was
blowing into Delhi. In earlier years, the burning took place in
September when the wind direction had not yet changed and the smoke had
remained in Punjab.

An aerosol and remote sensing scientist at NASA, Dr. Hiren Jethva,
noticed my article and posted it on the social media site twitter along
with the comment “Now I understand why satellites detect more fires in
November post-2009 over Punjab.”


I contacted Dr. Jethva who on second thoughts disputed my finding and
pointed out that his data showed that the pattern of smoke drifting to
Delhi began in the period between 2006 and 2009 and not after 2009. I
used his input to research further and found that although the law had
been passed in 2009, it had been implemented using incentives and
persuasion in 2007, and through a government order in 2008. I was thus
able to reconcile the scientist’s data with my theory, and in 2018, I
wrote a follow up article entitled ‘Monsanto’s profits, not Diwali,
creating smoke in Delhi’ in which I mentioned Dr. Jethva’s observation
and explained how the process had begun in 2007 and 2008.

Both articles were widely read by the general public as well as the
members of the scientific community and even resulted in Monsanto
objecting to my article as I had stated that the laws in Punjab and
Haryana benefited Monsanto. Sunday Guardian carried their objections
along with my rebuttal.

Sometime in November 2019, a few people called attention to a video by
Shekhar Gupta in which he had plagiarized my findings and credited his
online magazine for it. His plagiarism with all relevant web links is
documented in an article by Satya Dosapati entitled ‘Shame on you
Shekhar Gupta for Plagiarizing.’

It is unclear whether the Press Council of India will pursue action
against Shekhar Gupta despite their ‘Norms of journalistic conduct’
stating under the heading ‘Plagiarism’ that “[u]sing or passing off the
writings or ideas as one’s own without crediting the source, is an
offence against ethics of journalism.”

While looking for the plagiarized work in Shekhar Gupta’s online
magazine, I stumbled upon a press release from Cornell University
claiming credit for my work.


This press release, dated 30 July 2019, more than a year and half after
my original research was published, claimed that “[a] new study reveals
how water-use policies require farmers to transplant rice later in the
year, which in turn delays harvests and concentrates agricultural
burnings of crop residues in November — a month when breezes stagnate —
leading to increased air pollution.”

Their actual paper regurgitated the theory published in the Sunday
Guardian along with some pretty pictures and data. The authors could
have claimed that they corroborated or validated my work but chose to
claim that they came up with the theory and even published it in Nature
Sustainability. In the world of science, Nature is supposed to be a
“prestigious” journal.

When I confronted Andrew McDonald, a faculty member of Cornell
University who was listed in the paper as the main author for
communication, he claimed that it was the first time that he had heard
of my work and that his team had come up with the finding independently.
However, it turned out that one of the official reviewers of their paper
before it was published was the same NASA scientist who had posted my
article on twitter. The NASA scientist had sent the authors the web link
to my second article (which in turn summarized and linked to my first
article) and suggested that they refine their work, presumably meaning
that they should fix the erroneous date of 2009 and cite my article
while making the fix. The authors had responded to this suggestion by
saying that their study was more of a quantitative work and was
consistent with the major findings of the Sunday Guardian article.
Despite acknowledging my work during the review phase, the authors
proceeded to conceal the existence of my research and did not cite it in
their paper.

The authors also did not make the suggested refinement that would have
led to them mentioning the pattern of smoke drifting to Delhi in 2007
and 2008 as I had done in my second article. Instead, they retained the
erroneous date of 2009. Replication of errors is a hallmark of
plagiarized works and this paper was no exception. The authors of the
paper had clearly used my first article as the basis for their ideas and
did not bother to incorporate the information in my second article even
when it was made available to them perhaps because they were not the
real researchers and did not understand the significance of the
reviewer’s comments. Unlike Dr. Hiren Jethva, who had used the
scientific method to look at actual data and conclude that my original
date of 2009 could not be correct, the authors of the paper which was
published in Nature Sustainability did not use the scientific method.
Had they done so, they would have arrived at the same conclusion as Dr.
Jethva.

It should be noted that even if the paper in Nature Sustainability was
an independent finding (which it was not), the authors had an obligation
to cite the Sunday Guardian article as it contained the same conclusions
as in their paper and existed before their work. Moreover, the Sunday
Guardian articles were brought to the attention of the authors in a
timely manner before the final version of their paper was published.

When confronted, instead of claiming that the omission of the citation
to my article was an oversight on the part of the authors, McDonald
doubled down and pointed to another paper published by a group in
Harvard University as evidence of independent groups arriving at the
same conclusion. That paper too did not cite my article and was
published at eartharxiv.org. Ironically, arxiv.org was created by
Cornell University in order to help authors protect their works from
plagiarism when they submitted their papers for review. The Harvard
group had used a site that existed to prevent plagiarism to publish a
paper with plagiarized information.

I soon attempted to file a formal complaint with Cornell University and
found that I faced a wall of resistance from them. It took me several
emails and phone calls even to figure out where I should complain. I was
directed by the President’s office to the Office of the Counsel which in
turn directed me back to the President’s office and the office of the
Provost. Soon after, I received an email from the university saying they
had appointed an investigator, but the tone of his email seemed to
indicate that he did not want to accept my claim of plagiarism.

Sensing deception on the part of the university, I decided to make the
matter public and copied a number of journalists, activists, and other
members of the academia when I sent subsequent emails to the university.
One of the people included in the email list was Professor C.K. Raju who
told me, “Your idea published in Sunday Guardian is quite sensational.
Must have been widely noticed.” Professor Raju himself had been a victim
of plagiarism multiple times, the most notable case being the Fields
Medal winner Michael Atiyah plagiarizing from his work in the field of
physics. Other works of Professor Raju related to the history of
Mathematics had also been plagiarized by George Joseph and Dennis
Almeida of the University of Manchester and University of Exeter.

On the advice of Professor CK Raju, I contacted the journal Nature
Sustainability but they did not respond to my complaint immediately and
it took several emails and phone calls before they acknowledged the
complaint. It was the same case with Harvard University. The professor
at Harvard tried telling me that their work was a “preprint” despite the
paper having been published online at eartharXiv.org.

Meanwhile, the investigator at Cornell University advanced the process
but ran it like a kangaroo court that had already decided my guilt. His
questions to me insinuated that I must have plagiarized from others! He
even asked me whether credit for my idea should really be given to those
who had published the explanation that smoke mixed with moisture gives
rise to smog since that was a weather phenomenon and my explanation
related to the wind direction too was a weather phenomenon. I let him
know that my article had nothing to do with the process of formation of
smog, but I also told him that he was running his court like the court
in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

Another question was why I had not complained to the institute where the
Indian co-author worked despite the fact that the author from Cornell
University was listed as the contact for communication and one of the
two people who conceptualized the idea behind the paper. Apart from
making this point clear, I also told the investigator that his line of
questioning indicated that he was trying to evade affixing
responsibility on the person in Cornell University and instead wanted to
throw the Indian author under the bus.

It is more than a month now since my response, and I haven’t heard back
from Cornell University. In the case of Harvard University and Nature
Sustainability, they have made no effort to gather the facts from me
despite sending me a short message claiming to be investigating the
matter. All of this must lead one to conclude that intellectual
dishonesty, lack of academic ethics, and plagiarism must be par for the
course at both Cornell University and Harvard University, and when they
are caught, they are reluctant to take responsibility but make it
difficult for the victim of plagiarism.