Kartik Lokhande's blog

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...

* CRISIL Infrastructure Advisory ‘incorporates’ research findings of a VNIT professor on Urban Heat Island effect, but deprives him of due credit * The instance raises questions about genuineness of analysis purportedly done by the consultancy firm * It also highlights how genuine researchers with data useful for urban planning have been omitted from the process of revising the CDP for Nagpur By Kartik Lokhande  Good artists copy, great artists steal. This quote of legendary Pablo Picasso describes aptly how the draft of revised City Development Plan (CDP) for Nagpur appears to have been prepared. A shocking instance has come to fore that the consultancy firm CRISIL Infrastructure Advisory has ‘appropriated’ the research findings of a city-based professor in the draft report, and has ‘incorporated’ as its own the findings as ‘observations’ on Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect analysis. The original research was conducted by Yashwant Bhasker Katpatal, Professor, Departmen...