Manish Chauhan of Jago Investor has brought to my notice a troubling fact: A Dainik Bhaskar Group newspaper, Business Bhaskar, has copied a detailed article that Manish wrote about, a concept he invented called the “GFactor”. While giving ratings for various investment criteria (liquidity, risk, return etc.) is not unique as a concept – it is followed by rating agencies, sites like value research or morningstar etc. – the Business Bhaskar author has copied the entire concept , translating it to Hindi, giving no credit to the original author.
The Author and plagiariser is a “Navneet Dhawan” whose photo says:
“Writer, Certified Financial Planner and Financial Advisor”
in Hindi. It’s likely he didn’t know that the content was not supposed to be stolen, but that’s not excusable either. And the only English heading, the title of the page, says “Make rating on the basis of investment” – it should be “Make investments on the basis of a rating”. But that’s me being a Grammar G.
Obviously Manish is miffed, and rightfully so. It’s shameful that a public company like DB Corp would allow this to happen, and hopefully as the information gets to them, they will take the content off the site. Mr. Dhawan could perhaps redeem reputation by publicly apologising, and going forward, providing due credit with permission. There is a need to bring financial knowledge to Hindi and local language newspapers, but stealing it off web sites is not the right way to do it.
