The call was from an unknown number and my colleague picked it up by mistake. The person on the other end, instead of hawking property in Noida or Gurgaon, mentioned that she belonged to a research organisation. This piqued my colleague’s curiosity. He was stuck in one of the perennial rush-hour traffic jams in Delhi and so he continued the conversation.

What he found out was astonishing: The person told him that their organisation is in the business of getting one’s research published in Scopus-listed or those listed by the University Grants Commission Consortium for Academic and Research Ethics (UGC CARE), for a fee. This was not all; you didn’t need to actually do anything. They would even write the paper for you (of course, for an additional fee) and you could decide on the month when you wanted the paper to be published. When my colleague asked her to send all the details, she messaged him the details of the offer and continued a WhatsApp conversation subsequently with many messages regarding choice of journals, negotiations on fees, etc. This was not a cloak-and-dagger operation. It was all open and brazen.

The organisation had sensed a huge market opportunity, and was making the most of it — courtesy the mandarins who decide our higher education policy.

The first opportunity for such organisations came when the........

© hindustantimes