Dr Chittaranjan Purandare has been accused of approving the thesis submitted by a batch of his students knowing that they had copied it from one submitted by a previous batch.
A city doctor blamed by a college for abetting plagiarism said he was considering legal action against it.
Dr Chittaranjan Purandare, general-secretary of the Federation of Obstetric and Gynaecological Societies of India, has been accused by the College of Physicians and Surgeons (Parel) of approving the thesis submitted by a batch of his students last year despite knowing that they had copied it from one submitted by a previous batch.
But Dr Purandare said the college dean and faculty, not he, were responsible for clearing the allegedly copied thesis since the authors of the disputed thesis were not students of CPS.
Dr Purandare said, “I am an honorary doctor and am not authorised to issue certificates or clear theses of medical students. Students are expected to submit their thesis and get it signed by an external faculty and submit it to the college. It is only the college dean that can clear the thesis.”
He alleged that the CPS was conducting a vendetta against him. Dr Purandare, who was accused by CPS for remaining absent for an enquiry into the matter, said that the college had never informed him about the enquiry.
He said that he could not have detected the plagiarism since he had no access to the old thesis, which was in the possession of the college.
This was confirmed by one of his students, who told DNA on condition of anonymity: “It is not possible for him to know whether the thesis was copied since the old thesis is in the possession of the library in-charge.”
Meanwhile, a member of the Council of CPS, Sudhakar Sane, said that Dr Purandare’s actions were still quite doubtful. Sane said that Purandare had also checked the previous year’s thesis, so it was conceivable that he had some memory of the similarity between the two theses.
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