In the digital age, with information available at the click of a button, picking up lines from published online pieces is child’s play. When so much is found on the net, there is a tendency among many students to simply copy and paste while making term papers and also for writing a thesis for PhD or other higher degrees. To put a cap on such unscrupulous practices, the high court gave a directive to close monitor the PhD giving process and the University Grants Commission, UGC has taken the court order seriously. Now the task may sound easy though in reality, it’s just the opposite because the process of checking plagiarism will need a large manpower adept in scouring the net. Then there is also the possibility of a collusion between a person who adopted unfair means and the monitoring person (s).

So, to set up such a system, the complete accountability of the people employed to monitor has to be ascertained first. In this regard, the public universities can set up a cross examination unit for each faculty which will support in the assessment of PhD related papers and writings. To ensure transparency, these units can either be made independent with the top position given to a military person or they can be guided by a board comprising civil society members, acclaimed teachers, media personalities and social thinkers. To talk about plagiarism, the habit is so rampant that even at the undergraduate level, students are often found to pinch materials from the net to pass as their own work. The implication of such a practice is the development of a sense among the young that one can get away by adopting unethical methods. Such a feeling is the precursor to a set of predatory values often concealed under a masquerade of flimsy morality.

Many of the students who pursue PhD eventually end up as teachers and if their thesis had been taken form the net or pilfered from somewhere else, their teaching ethos will certainly be tainted. The universities must have monitoring bodies while the lesson that materials picked from somewhere else need to be attributed has to be implanted among the students. To counter the habit, every freshman course can introduce sessions to create awareness among students about plagiarism and its long term pernicious impact.