RETRACTED: Status of groundwater arsenic pollution in Holocene aquifers from parts of the Ghaghara Basin, India: Its relation to geomorphology and hydrogeological setting

This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy).This article has been retracted at the request of the Editors-in-Chief.Figure 7 of this paper and figure 7 of the author’s previous paper that appeared in Current Science in 2010 (Vol 98, issue 10) represent two different XRD studies of mineralogical assemblages for rock samples which are supposed to have been collected from areas a considerable distance apart. We notice that although some portions of the figure are different, other parts are exactly the same, including areas of background noise.We feel that the minor differences at the low end of both graphs below 14 degrees 2 theta have been introduced by hand to make one of the plots appear different to the other. If the same sample is run on the same machine it is unlikely to result in two identical plots, so to run two different samples on different machines and get the same plot is almost impossible.As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.