During my tenure as Director of NIPER, I observed a deeply troubling trend — senior professors exercising exclusive control over costly scientific instruments, purchased with public money, for personal academic gain. My proposal to centralize all such equipment under a single Central Instrumentation Laboratory (CIL) met stiff resistance from within the institute. The reason? Control over these machines meant control over credit, authorship, and even monetary benefits.
Take, for example, the NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) instrument housed in the Department of Pharmaceutical Analysis, headed by Dr. Saranjit Singh. This multi-crore machine remained inaccessible to other departments. Most of Dr. Singh’s publications stemmed from the data generated on this very instrument, which no one else could use. There was no transparency about how often the instrument was run, for whom, or how the usage was allocated.
Similarly, Dr. Kulbhushan Tikoo — now Dean of the Institute — operated in much the same manner in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology. His research, too, was heavily reliant on high-end instruments, many of which were unavailable anywhere else in the region. Outsiders, including faculty from other universities and colleges, were allowed to use these instruments — but only after paying a fee. Worse, they were told they must include Dr. Tikoo’s name in their publications, regardless of his actual involvement. Sometimes, even the instrument operator’s name was added as a co-author.
High-end devices like the High Resolution Transmission Electron Microscope (HR-TEM) cost several crores of rupees. Their Annual Maintenance Contracts (AMCs) alone run into lakhs each year. Despite such massive investment from the public exchequer, these instruments are guarded by a select few, inaccessible to students and researchers from other departments within the institute itself.
Shockingly, despite this privileged access to rare, high-cost equipment, the quality of research remains questionable. Dr. Tikoo was recently listed among the top 2% scientists in the world by the Science-wide Author Databases of Standard Citation Indicators for 2022. However, these databases do not account for retracted papers.
The Indian Express had first reported on retracted publications by NIPER scientists back in 2014. In 2019, Science Chronicle listed 127 Indian papers retracted for image duplication and data manipulation, with Dr. Tikoo and another NIPER professor, Dr. Gopabandhu Jena, prominently named.
Consider this example:
“Augmenting the photocatalytic performance of cobalt ferrite via change in structural and optical properties with the introduction of different rare earth metal ions”, Ceramics International, Volume 45, 2019.
Authored by Manisha Dhiman, Bhupendra Chudasama, Vinod Kumar, K.B. Tikoo, and Sonal Singhal.
DOI: 10.1016/j.ceramint.2018.11.033
What does a paper on ceramics and photocatalysis have to do with pharmacology and toxicology?
It is time for an independent Scientific Audit of NIPER Mohali. Citizens, taxpayers, and academic stakeholders have a right to know:
- How many times were these costly instruments used?
- Who used them — internal researchers or outsiders?
- How many publications emerged from their use?
- Were authorships granted based on genuine contribution, or in exchange for access?
- And if, despite monopolizing these resources, some scientists still produce retracted work — what does that say about integrity in research?
A scientific institution that hides behind silos, restricts access, and rewards influence over merit, undermines both education and public trust. It’s time to open the lab doors and let transparency in.
