NMC to look into ‘copy, deceive, paste’ job in draft CDP



Staff Reporter
Taking a serious cognisance of the ‘copy, deceive, paste’ job done by consultancy firm CRISIL Infrastructure Advisory while preparing draft City Development Plan (CDP), Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) administration has decided to look into the matter.
“I shall look into the matter and examine the details,” said Shravan Hardikar, Municipal Commissioner, on Friday. He also sought the relevant documents from ‘The Hitavada’ to go into the details. Pravin Datke, Mayor, said that he would ask the Municipal Commissioner to conduct an enquiry into the matter and see that due credit of original researchers was given to them.
Through a report published on CityLine front page on March 22, ‘The Hitavada’ had exposed the intellectual property fraud committed by CRISIL Infrastructure Advisory while preparing the draft CDP. The consultancy firm ‘copied’ and ‘pasted’ the findings from original research conducted by Yashwant Bhasker Katpatal, Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (VNIT); Abhijeet Kute, and Deepty Ranjan Satapathy. Further, the consultancy firm used at least two ‘unique-to-the-research’ images from the original research, without acknowledging the source.
The original research titled ‘Surface and Air Temperature Studies in Relation to Land Use/Land Cover of Nagpur Urban Area Using Landsat 5 TM Data’ was published in American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Journal of Urban Planning and Development in September 2008. The original research explained certain characteristics of Nagpur under the head ‘Study Area’, and the draft CDP carried these details mostly verbatim on Page-171. Further, at least five of the six characteristics from original research were reproduced on Page-171.
The draft CDP prepared by CRISIL Infrastructure Advisory carried in verbatim the entire set of summary of analysis of Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect in Nagpur city. All five research findings from the original research paper were ‘copied’ and ‘pasted’ almost completely in the draft CDP without quoting source of the same. The ‘copy, deceive, paste’ job done by CRISIL Infrastructure Advisory without acknowledging the original researchers, raised questions over genuineness of other datasets and analyses used in draft CDP. 

(Filed on March 27, 2015)

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