Ministry caught in Net plagiarism

NEW DELHI: Blonde, Chinese, Hispanic and Black kids sitting on veneer wood desks, fiddling with chrome yellow Staedtler pencils, reading Spanish: A classroom so picture perfect that the human resource development (HRD) ministry couldn't but resist putting half a dozen photographs in its annual report. Some on the cover and several inside, these pictures are pleasing to the eye but hard to stomach.Having printed and distributed the report, the ministry was quietly hoping the pictures would pass off as snapshots of sarkari schools in India. But when asked about their source, a senior official conceded they were not from the ministry's stock and were probably downloaded from the Net''. Perhaps done to add glitz to a staid government document, this cut-and-paste job has been performed on a report which has one chapter devoted to copyright! The annual report, which documents the progress made by the ministry during last year,... ...has to have photographs of primary schools, Kendriya and Navodaya Vidyalayas, and colleges and universities which it funds. The official said a large stock of such pictures was given to Ed.Cil, a government undertaking that put the report together. A majority of them were used too. But it is confusing how and why foreign pictures found their way into the report,'' an official wondered. Washing its hand of the matter, Ed Cil said they simply picked from the stock provided by the ministry. The ministry suspects the additional photos may have been added during designing or printing. "It is embarrassing as none of the pictures in questions are from our stock. There was no lack of authentic pictures," said an official. The word international" seemed to have served as the cue. But officials said the foreign pictures in the report are not that of the ministry's initiatives abroad. Or at least, they are not the ones the ministry had sent for use in the report. Most of the "downloaded" pictures have an Indian-looking boy or girl in sharp focus.