Academic Integrity in India

Here is something a friend posted. This is quite disturbing, in that, the hype surrounding the IITs just comes crashing once you look at such isolated incidents. India should stop dropping its eggs into a single basket. I hope we can look beyond the IITs which have done nothing to the repair of the fractured state of research and development in India, that would be called commendable...
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Hello folks,

I came across a disturbing event concerning academic integrity a few
weeks back, and thought you guys should know.

I read a paper titled "Eliminating Steganography in Internet Traffic with
Active Wardens" a few months back. And, a few weeks back I found a
similar work published in IIT Kanpur's Hacker's workshop 2004 -
IITHACK2004. The paper was titled, "Eliminating covert channels in
TCP/IP using active wardens". When I started reading the paper, beyond
a point the paper sounded very similar. Then I realised, except the
title that was deftly changed, the contents of the paper were
plagiarized from the paper I mentioned before. And, the paper has been
accepted, and published in the conference.

I wrote to the original author of the paper. And, we also communicated
the issue to the conference committee. And, the paper was removed from
the conference proceedings. The disturbing things in the whole
incident are:

1) The co-authors are also PhD's, and i presume they are professors.
They either didnt read the papers / consiously allowed their students
to copy.

2) The conference committee was not competant enough to know the
published works in the area, and allowed a plagiarized work to be
published. The committee members are professors in IIT, and I wonder
how they could have done this.

I only wish that this was an isolated incident.

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Warm regards
Karthick Jayaraman