Draft:Achal Agrawal

Agrawal received a Doctor of Philosophy in applied mathematics from the Paris-Saclay University in Orsay, France, in 2016^[9]. His doctoral research concerned coordination protocols and resource allocation in wireless communication networks^[10]. He returned to India in 2018 and worked as an academic in data science before founding India Research Watch^[11].

Agrawal founded India Research Watch^[12] in November 2022 after an encounter with a student who had used paraphrasing software to repackage published work, an experience that prompted him to confront what he saw as widespread normalisation of research misconduct in Indian higher education^[13][14].

IRW uses publicly available data, including the Retraction Watch database, to track retraction trends at Indian institutions. Agrawal's analyses showed that India's retraction rate rose from 0.7 per 1,000 papers in 2014 to a peak of 4.8 in 2022^[15][16]. In 2024, Agrawal and collaborator Moumita Koley at the Indian Institute of Science flagged concerns that some universities may have been manipulating metrics^[17] used in the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF)^[18][19]. IRW's advocacy is widely credited with contributing to a 2025 policy change by the NIRF to impose penalties^[20] on higher-education institutions with high numbers of retracted papers^[21][22]