Pesticides study lands JNU researchers in legal row

A team of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) researchers ran into trouble after a crop care industry association challenged the veracity of their study, which claimed to have detected high quantities of over 20 banned pesticides in vegetables produced in the National Capital Region, posing cancer risk to people.

The Crop Care Federation of India (CCFI) issued a legal notice to the JNU vice chancellor Sudhir Kumar Sopory, the varsity’s registrar, its research team and the international journal, Environmental Science and Pollution Research, which published the research article, seeking them to justify the findings of the study.

It also wrote to President Pranab Mukherjee and the Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry recently, urging them to order a probe into the matter, suspecting the research findings to be a case of “laboratory fraud” as the JNU vice chancellor and the research team were incommunicado despite CCFI’s repeated request for sharing basic details of the study with it.

“For over seven months, we have been sending several communications to them seeking basic information such as chromatograms, limit of detection, limit of quantification,
calibration details and relevant raw data pertaining to the published study. But the vice chancellor and his research team remain tight-lipped. It’s a tell tale case of fraudulent study,” CCFI’s public policy advisor S Ganesan told Deccan Herald.

The study titled ‘Health risk assessment of organochlorine pesticide exposure through dietary intake of vegetables grown in the peri-urban sites of Delhi’ was conducted by P S Khillare, a professor at JNU’s School of Environmental Sciences, research students Sapna Chourasiya and Darpa Saurav Jyothi.

“The fraudulent study, which tarnished the image of India’s vegetable production in a journal published abroad, was conducted using scholarship from the University Grants Commission. What we have found and exposed is probably the tip of the proverbial iceberg. A thorough and professional investigation is needed to cleanse JNU,” Ganesan said.

While Khillare could not be reached for his comments, the JNU vice chancellor expressed his inability to take questions saying he was in a meeting.


Separate e-mails were sent to Khillare and Sopory seeking their response to the CCFI’s accusation but they remained unanswered till this report was filed.

“JNU’s failure to be transparent with certain basic data proves there are fundamental flaws in the published study. The raw data of the public funded research study should be accessible and verifiable,” CCFI’s Rajju Shroff said, adding that the federation would demand the government that an autonomous body been set up on the lines of US’ Office of Research Integrity investigate and punish laboratory frauds committed by scientists.
DH News Service