AIIMS Delhi. Photo: PTI
- Disability-rights activists have alleged plagiarism in a report on guidelines for admission of candidates with benchmark disabilities in postgraduate courses at AIIMS.
- In August 2021, candidates with disabilities and applying to postgraduate medical courses in AIIMS were reportedly being denied admission.
- So AIIMS Delhi constituted an expert group under the supervision of Sanjay Wadhwa to “identify discipline-wise suitability” of potential PG students with disabilities.
- The Wadhwa committee report is tonally uneven, self-congratulatory, self-contradictory, and appears to have plagiarised from other reports around the world.
Hyderabad: In December last year, the All India Institutes of Medical Science (AIIMS), the country’s premier medical institutions, received flak for denying admission to candidates with disabilities in their postgraduate programmes.
On this #HumanRightsDay, I am exposing #AbleistAIIMS, their highly ableist culture & shocking plagiarised report. The genesis is my RTI exposing how AIIMS deliberately denied #DocsWithDisabilities postgrad seats in AIIMS for the last eight exams whereas JIPMER, PGI embraced. 1/ pic.twitter.com/VHufbU5seD
— Satendra Singh, MD (@drsitu) December 10, 2021
Now, disability-rights activists have alleged plagiarism in an expert committee report on guidelines for admission of candidates with benchmark disabilities in postgraduate courses at AIIMS. This document was made public by AIIMS Delhi in December 2021.
The allegations reflect poorly on the quality of the attention the institute is paying to students with disabilities.
The guidelines
In August 2021, Times of India reported that candidates with disabilities who were applying to postgraduate medical courses in AIIMS were being denied admission. The premier medical institutions – with functional centres in around a dozen cities – appeared to be flouting the 5%-reservation criterion stipulated for persons with disabilities under the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016.
Later in 2021, AIIMS Delhi constituted an expert group under the supervision of Sanjay Wadhwa, a professor in and the head of the department of physical medicine and rehabilitation, to “identify the discipline-wise suitability” of potential postgraduate students with various disabilities.
The expert group also consisted of professors from other departments, including the departments of ophthalmic sciences, ENT (ear-nose-throat), neurology, psychiatry and haematology.
According to Satendra Singh, a professor of physiology at the University College of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, and a noted disability-rights activist, the Wadhwa committee did not have any member who was a person with disability.
While the expert group’s report said that it sought and included “feedback from a few students with disabilities”, an application that Singh filed under the Right to Information (RTI) Act 2005 asking for the minutes of these deliberations did not elicit a response. (The Wire Science has seen a copy of the response to the RTI query.)
But AIIMS did reveal that three doctors with disabilities – Suman Jain, Rakesh Kumar Deepak and Junaid Alam – were employed at the institution. None were part of the expert group, however.
The report – which called itself “quite unique, perhaps revolutionary, with far reaching consequences” – begins by summarising postgraduate medical curricula in India and how other major educational programs restrict access to some of their courses for persons with certain disabilities.
For example, it said how “candidates with disabilities are considered not suitable for services such as pilots (flying aircrafts), fire-fighters, drivers, defence personnel on front lines, etc.”
However, it did not shed light on how institutional changes can enable persons with disabilities to pursue educational programs.
The report had two sets of recommendations. One is directed at the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, and asked that it revise certain definitions of disability. For example, the expert group report talked about “chronic neurologic disorders”, which in the ministry’s guidelines includes Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis as indicative conditions.
The report highlighted the progressive nature of Parkinson’s disease and asked whether there could “be a six-monthly evaluation” and whether such candidates should “be removed from the ongoing course after reaching a certain level of disability”.
The second set of recommendations pertain to medical disciplines that are suitable for candidates with certain kinds of disabilities. For example, the Wadhwa committee report recommended that a candidate with either of the following disabilities could pursue a doctor of medicine (a.k.a. MD) degree in biochemistry:
“Limited locomotor disability such as single lower limb involvement due to polio/amputation/arthritis, mild paraparesis, scoliosis, leprosy cured person, dwarfism, mild and limited acid attack sparing hands and eyes, low vision, mild chronic neurological conditions, blood disorders.”
Similarly, in the case of a master of surgery degree in orthopaedics, the report recommended that people with the following disabilities be considered:
“Limited locomotor disability such as single lower limb involvement due to polio/amputation/arthritis, scoliosis, mild and limited acid attack sparing hands and eyes, blood disorders.”
According to Singh, the Wadhwa committee report does not describe even one speciality that candidates with locomotor disabilities in both their legs can pursue. He said this sets a dangerous precedent because it ignores that there are already well-established doctors with disabilities in both legs doing commendable work. One example is oncologist and Padma Shri awardee Suresh Advani.
The report also categorically stated that the final decision regarding whether a candidate with disability will be offered admission in a particular postgraduate program is to “be based on detailed assessment and fitness on a case-to-case basis, involving the experts from the concerned specialty also.”
Allegations of plagiarism
According to Singh and Vikrant Sirohi, a senior medical health officer at the Roorkee Municipal Corporation, the expert group plagiarised parts of their report. Both Singh and Sirohi are also members of ‘Doctors with Disabilities: Agents of Change’, a Ghaziabad-based collective of health professionals with disabilities with members across the country.
For example, the following section in page 8 of the Wadhwa committee report:
Patients often identify closely with medical professionals with lived experience of ill health or disability, who can offer insight and sensitivity about how a recent diagnosis and ongoing impairment can affect patients. Such experience is invaluable to the medical profession as a whole, and illustrates the importance of attracting and retaining disabled learners.
appears to be identical to a section on page 24 of a guide prepared by the UK General Medical Council in 2019:
Patients often identify closely with medical professionals with lived experience of ill health or disability, who can offer insight and sensitivity about how a recent diagnosis and ongoing impairment can affect patients. Such experience is invaluable to the medical profession as a whole, and illustrates the importance of attracting and retaining disabled learners.
Similarly, on page 10, the Wadhwa committee report wrote:
The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 does not prevent medical colleges from selectively accepting the most highly qualified applicants, nor does it impose any obligation on the medical colleges to lower their standards!
This is remarkably similar to a following section from a 2005 paper published in the American Journal of Medical Rehabilitation:
“The [Americans with Disabilities Act] does not prevent medical schools from selectively accepting the most highly qualified applicants, nor does it impose any obligation on medical schools to lower their standards.”
Singh has noted other instances of alleged plagiarism in his tweets (here and here).
Notably, the publicly available copy of the Wadhwa committee report neither used quotation marks (to indicate that the text within is from another source) nor includes a list of references at the end. Both elements are part of standard practice when composing reports, papers, etc., for the sake of attribution and accountability.
These alleged instances of plagiarism came to light when Singh and Sirohi were pursuing the matter of exclusion of persons with disabilities in postgraduate medical education in India. When the duo first complained to the Union health ministry with a copy of their allegations to AIIMS in mid-December 2021, they received no response.
Sirohi subsequently filed an application under the RTI Act in January 2022. The ministry forwarded the application to AIIMS and told Sirohi as much.
On March 24 this year, the Research Integrity and Publication Ethic Committee (RIPEC) at AIIMS wrote to Sirohi with a summary of its findings. It had concluded that while there were instances of overlap with “freely available guideline documents,” these did not “amount to any breach of intellectual property”.
1) The 2005 paper mentioned above is not freely available. 2) Freely available documents are not open to be plagiarised.
In addition, the 2019 UK General Medicine Council guide clearly states that while its content is freely reproducible, it has to be “reproduced accurately and not in a misleading context”. The guide also states that the parts reproduced should acknowledge the original document (by title) as a source.
RIPEC also wrote that references and annexures to the Wadhwa committee report had not been uploaded to the AIIMS website – but didn’t say why.
According to Singh, he and Sirohi had identified up to 30% plagiarism in the Wadhwa committee report. (The Wire Science couldn’t independently verify this claim.)
According to the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations 2018, 10-40% plagiarism constitutes a level I offence and warrants retraction of the manuscript.
However, committee reports may not fall under the ambit of these regulations, Pushkar, the director of the International Centre, Goa, and an expert on higher education in India, told The Wire Science.
According to the regulations, they apply only to “research papers, theses, dissertations, chapters in books, full-fledged books and any other similar work, submitted for assessment/opinion leading to the award of master and research level degrees or publication in print or electronic media by students or faculty or researcher or staff” of a higher-education institution.
That said, Pushkar added, instances of plagiarism in reports such as these does set a “terrible example.”
Sirohi was dissatisfied with RIPEC’s response and filed a second application under the RTI Act on April 19 asking for a copy of the full report and the AIIMS plagiarism policy. He is yet to receive a response and has filed a first appeal, he told The Wire Science.
Uneven tone
For all the allegations of copying, however, the report is also tonally uneven. For example, it claimed to be an inclusive guide to postgraduate medical education in the country to date – but said in the same paragraph: “But one must accept the fact that ‘everyone cannot do everything’.”
For another example: in a paragraph below this claim, the report wrote:
Hospitals generally sprawl over different levels and large areas, which can pose a challenge for doctors with disabilities. In many developing countries, elevators often do not work due to power shortages, most of the doors are not automated, and the ramps may not exist, may be dirty, inaccessible, and/or crowded.
According to Singh, this is similar to sentences in a 2020 document on a website called News Medical:
Hospitals generally sprawl over different levels and large areas, which can pose a challenge for doctors with disabilities. In many developing countries, elevators often do not work due to power shortages, doors are not automated and the ramps are dirty and crowded.”
But while the 2020 report used these lines to make the case to improve the availability of reasonable accommodation in hospitals for persons with disabilities, the Wadhwa committee report only added: “Safety of the candidates with disabilities themselves is also important!”
Sirohi said it is high time that AIIMS consult doctors with disabilities, especially those already at the institute, to frame such guidelines.
Requests for comments to Sanjay Wadhwa and the director’s office of AIIMS Delhi hadn’t elicited a reply at the time of publishing this report.
Sayantan Datta (they/them) are a queer-trans science writer, communicator and journalist. They currently work with the feminist multimedia science collective TheLifeofScience.com, and tweet at @queersprings.