Article on “suspicious activities” at the Indo-Chinese border retracted – Retraction Watch
A newspaper has retracted a 2020 story about finding “suspicious activity” on the Indo-China border – including an incursion in which 20 Indian soldiers were reportedly killed – citing “legal reasons”.
The abstract in Springer Nature’s Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensingwhich alleges that the soldiers were “brutally killed”, is riddled with grammar and punctuation errors:
According to India-China boundary sharing agreement, China was supposed to be posted up to finger 8 and India up to finger 4 and between finger 8 and finger 4 was considered as a no man’s land in which only patrols are authorized. But in recent days, the Chinese have crossed the 8 finger position and set up camp near the 4 finger position means in no man’s land, thus violating the agreement and thus causing a critical situation between the two countries. Also on June 15, 2020, a group of soldiers entered their camp to settle this border sharing issue but were brutally killed by Chinese soldiers during which 20 of our soldiers lost their lives. Therefore, considering the current situation, it is now very important to monitor and analyze the activities of the Chinese military so that India can prepare for any further issues. Monitoring is not about detecting objects in an image but about analyzing suspicious activity in a scenario. Therefore, the proposed surveillance dashboard can be used to analyze the activities carried out by the Chinese military in a specific number of days when capturing satellite images. The manual analysis step of these activities will be reduced. The system is based on content-based image retrieval using deep learning with real-time feature extraction property.
(For more on the June 2020 incident see this BBC story, and for more on “Finger 4” and “Finger 8” see this story from the India time.)
The instructions are vague:
The editor has removed this article because it was published in error before the peer review process was completed. The content of this article has been removed for legal reasons. Authors were invited to submit a revised manuscript for further peer review. All authors agree with this retraction.
Aditya Kakde, of UPES in Dehradun, India and corresponding author of the article, did not respond to our request for comment.
We asked Shailesh Nayak, the journal’s editor and director of the National Institute for Advanced Studies at the Indian Institute of Science campus in Bangalore, for more details, including when the article was taken down and at what “legal reasons” refers to. . He only said:
We examine.
In the meantime, despite what the withdrawal notice says, the paper remains available.
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