Scientists applying to India’s leading research funding agency will be obliged to declare whether any of their publications have been retracted in the past five years.

In new guidelines unveiled by the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), applicants to its Advanced Research Grant will be obliged to disclose any retractions in the past five years and the reasons why these journal papers were removed.

Established in 2023, the ANRF (Anusandhan is Hindi for innovation) was created to lead India’s science and innovation strategy with plans to administer funding of about 1 trillion rupees (£10 billion) over a six-year period, of which 50 per cent is set to come from private sources. Its current budget is about £170 million and it has awarded about 930 grants across 19 different programmes since July 2025.

With the ANRF also likely to introduce the declaration of retractions requirement for its other grant schemes, the rule change represented a “landmark” moment in research funding, believed Achal Agrawal, founder of India Research Watch, which campaigns to improve research integrity in Indian higher education.

ɫ��ֱ��

According to Retraction Watch data collected by the volunteer-run group, about 20 per cent of global retractions in 2025 related to Indian authors, although India published only 5 per cent of the scientific literature that year.

“This is very important as it will make people think twice before even collaborating with people using dubious practices if they want to apply for grants. Perhaps other funding agencies might follow suit,” Agrawal told Times Higher Education.

ɫ��ֱ��

He noted that the ANRF held a similar position in India to America’s National Science Foundation as it was also responsible for coordinating spending from other funders including the Department of Science and Technology, Department of Biotechnology, the Indian Council of Medical Research and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research.

�ճ���� come after India’s domestic ranking of universities, the National Institutional Ranking Framework, announced it would penalise institutions if they had a substantial number of retractions.

Welcoming the ANRF’s rule change, Agrawal said this was “another signal that the Indian authorities are recognising the issue and taking some important and necessary steps”.

“The root cause, which [is] the flawed evaluation metrics, [is] however not being addressed. Until we address that, we will just keep treating the symptoms, which in this case are retractions,” he added.

ɫ��ֱ��

The new guidelines from the ANRF will also see research leaders sign a commitment that the grant application is “not AI-generated”, stating its “zero tolerance” policy for plagiarism meant “submissions may undergo third-party plagiarism checks, and any proposal found to contain plagiarised content will be rejected”.

“Any text used verbatim from another source must be identified with quotation marks and an appropriate citation, including use of AI tools,” it adds.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com