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Achal Agrawal did not set out to become a whistle-blower. He was teaching, lecturing, doing what most academics do — until a single conversation changed the direction of his career.
An eager undergraduate once approached him after a lecture, excited about a research idea. Midway through the explanation, the student casually mentioned using software to paraphrase published papers. When Agrawal flagged this as plagiarism, the student pushed back.
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The university’s plagiarism checker hadn’t caught it, so how could it be wrong?
“I was shocked,” Agrawal later recalled, as per Nature.
That moment, in late 2022, stayed with him. Not because it was rare — but because it wasn’t.
In research, using software to rephrase published work still counts as plagiarism if ideas are passed off as original — something many college students and research scholars remain unaware of.
What unsettled him most was how normalised the behaviour had become. Within a month, Agrawal quit his university job. He has not held a salaried academic position since.
Three years later, the freelance data scientist based in Raipur has landed on Nature’s prestigious list of 10 people who shaped science in 2025 — not for a breakthrough discovery, but for forcing India’s academic system to look hard at itself.
FROM APPLIED MATHEMATICS TO ACADEMIC ACCOUNTABILITY
Agrawal earned his PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Paris-Saclay in 2016. When he returned to India in 2018, he wanted to work in education.
Over the next few years, he moved across universities, worked briefly in a start-up, and even taught basic computer skills in a government school in a village in Uttarakhand.
What he saw inside higher education troubled him.
In France, publishing one solid conference paper a year was considered respectable. In India, he found institutions quietly pushing faculty to produce five or more papers annually — regardless of quality. Teaching, he noticed, often took a back seat. Research became a numbers game.
That pressure, Agrawal realised, was not accidental. It was structural.
THE PROBLEM WITH COUNTING PAPERS
India’s National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) plays an outsized role in higher education. Rankings influence reputation, admissions, and access to public funding. For years, institutions were rewarded for publishing more papers and receiving more citations — with limited scrutiny of quality or integrity.
Agrawal believed the system was nudging universities towards the wrong incentives.
After resigning in 2022, he launched India Research Watch (IRW) — an online platform tracking research-integrity issues, from plagiarism to paper retractions or the formal withdrawals of published papers after serious errors or ethical violations come to light.
He began publishing data-driven posts on LinkedIn, analysing retraction trends using the Retraction Watch database.
At first, it felt like shouting into the void.
Then people started listening.
IRW’s LinkedIn following has now crossed 77,000, and Agrawal receives around ten anonymous tips a day from students and academics flagging questionable research practices.
The platform allows whistle-blowers to submit evidence without revealing their identities — a crucial safeguard in a tightly networked academic system.
WHEN DATA FORCES POLICY TO MOVE
In 2024, Agrawal and research-policy analyst Moumita Koley published an analysis showing that some private institutions were climbing NIRF rankings by sharply increasing publication and citation counts — without clear checks on paper quality.
Their work suggested that output was rising faster than oversight.
Around the same time, Agrawal’s public dashboards showed something else: India ranked third globally in paper retractions, after China and the United States. Most Indian retractions cited concerns linked to research integrity.
The data was hard to ignore.
In August this year, the government announced a major shift. For the first time, NIRF rankings would penalise institutions if a substantial number of their papers were retracted. Some universities have already seen marks deducted. Tighter penalties are expected next year.
For Agrawal, it was a quiet moment of vindication.
“I was really happy that day,” he said, as per Nature.
Biomedical scientist Matt Spick from the University of Surrey put it more bluntly: Agrawal is trying to prove that Indian academia has been chasing the wrong metrics.
WHY THIS MATTERS BEYOND RANKINGS
Research misconduct is not just an internal academic issue. It affects teaching quality, public trust, and policy decisions built on unreliable findings.
When faculty are pushed to publish at any cost, corners get cut. Students learn that shortcuts are acceptable. Over time, that mindset seeps into classrooms, labs, and institutions.
Moumita Koley from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, who collaborated with Achal, told Nature that IRW has changed conversations, especially among early-career researchers. Many are now openly discussing integrity, something that was once whispered about.
NOT A CRUSADE, BUT A CORRECTION
Agrawal is careful not to frame his work as anti-university or anti-research. His critique is aimed at systems, not individuals.
He argues that most researchers want to do honest work — but incentives matter. When promotions, funding and prestige are tied to raw counts, behaviour follows.
The NIRF change does not fix everything. But it signals a shift: quality now has consequences.
For a country trying to build global research credibility, that shift matters.
WHY NATURE TOOK NOTICE
Nature’s annual list usually features Nobel-level discoveries, space missions and medical breakthroughs. Including a data scientist who tracks misconduct sends its own message.
Science is not shaped only by discoveries. It is shaped by the rules that govern how knowledge is produced.
By forcing uncomfortable data into public view, Achal Agrawal has altered those rules — quietly, persistently, and without institutional backing.
In a system that often rewards silence, he chose scrutiny.
And in doing so, he helped push Indian academia towards a harder, but healthier, conversation.
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