Degrees of deception: How AI is hurting India’s research credentials

The research paper looked almost perfect when it landed on the Pune academic’s desk. Clean English, solid methods, and neat citations. After many years of checking papers from universities, the reviewer had seen every kind of academic shortcut possible. But this felt different.

“I was 90% sure the content was generated by AI,” he says, asking not to be named. “But here's the tricky part—you can’t always pinpoint it with certainty.”

This worry now haunts Indian universities. From Delhi to Chennai, artificial intelligence has quietly changed how research gets done, and it’s not for the better. What started as help with writing has grown into something that threatens the reputation of Indian scholarship and research worldwide.

When Dr Lokman Meho released his 2025 Research Integrity Index from the American University of Beirut earlier this month, India’s academic world couldn’t look away. Unlike rankings that celebrate research output or global reputation, the RI² shows the ugly side: how often papers get pulled for being fake, flawed, or fraudulent.

The results were damning. Eleven of the world’s 15 universities with the highest retraction rates are in India. Thirty-two of 121 globally flagged “high-risk” institutions are Indian. These numbers are the highest in the world.