The Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry has asked IIT Kharagpur to put before its board of Governors the issue of denial of doctorate degree to a student of whistleblower Professor Rajeev Kumar, who claimed “vindictive attitude” towards him on part of the premier engineering institute, according to an RTI reply.
The move follows appeals by Kumar, who got posting at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) after a prolonged legal battle with IIT Kharagpur where he was posted earlier, and by his student Mahesh Shirole to the ministry.
Citing Shirole’s petition, the HRD ministry in a communiqué asked the registrar of IIT Kharagpur to place the issue before the board of governors for a decision. The copy of the communiqué was received in response to an RTI query filed by Kumar.
The board of governors of IIT Kharagpur is headed by Sanjiv Goenka, the Chairman of RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, Kumar said. Each autonomous Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) has a board of governors responsible for its overall general superintendence, direction and control of the affairs. Shirole had submitted his thesis in 2014 for the award of PhD, which was accepted by an Indian examiner but rejected by an NRI one, Kumar said. The original thesis would have been sent to a third examiner. Instead, the IIT kept on directing the student to revise the thesis and send that to the same NRI examiner twice, who rejected the thesis with new comments every time, he said.