50% of software used in Delhi is pirated
(By Reena Singh, The Times of India, New Delhi, 12th July, 1999)

Take a walk down the thriving Nehru Place shopping centre and ask computer software shops for pirated versions of Microsoft's Windows 98, MS Office or Adobe's popular publishing collection. In just under Rs. 900, you can pick up all three. In the regular market, the software is worth over Rs. 45,000.

Stringent laws are there to battle software piracy, but despite the over 100 civil suits filed against such of fenders, there have been no convictions to date in the city, or for that matter, anywhere in India for this typical white collar offence.

"At least 50 per cent of the Software in use in Delhi is believed to be pirated," says dewang Mehta of the National Association of Software (NASSCOM). This translates to losses worth Rs. 120 crore to the software industry. India-wide, piracy accounted for losses of Rs. 800 crore to the software industry last year. Typically, piracy occurs on three levels -- loading hard disks with software by manufacturers and system builders, counterfeiting CD Roms and replicating software into multiple computer systems," says Rajiv Nair, president, Microsoft India.

"Action by NASSCOM and the USA-based Business Software Alliance (BSA) lawyers against offenders in all the major metros, has now made larger corporates wary of using pirated software," he adds.

This is echoed by Gurmukh Singh, head of marketing at Multiple Zones India, among Delhi's leading direct marketers of IT products. Says Singh: "We don't ever support the sale of a PC without genuine software and operating systems, but beyond that, it is impossible to stop a customer from picking up other software from say, Nehru Place. The offenders are not larger corporates but small and medium business and the SOHO segment."

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