The Hindu Business Line : HCL Info begins awareness drive against fake products

The Chairman and CEO of HCL Infosystems told Business Line that when piracy seemed to be the answer, it conducted a full-fledged research for three months to assess the extent of counterfeit hardware that was used in `new' computers. "In this period, about 40 computers were sourced from across India, including the grey markets. We discovered that the monitor and Intel processor were the most counterfeited parts," he said.

Old CRT monitors fitted with new outer casing were passed off as new. Celeron 2.8 processors were labelled as Pentium IV 2.8 and packed into PCs.

That is why a `new' hard disk crashes and the engineer asks Rs 10,000 for repairs.

Often, the buyers were government organisations, mostly banks. "Most of these orders were big — valued at over Rs 10 crore," Mr Chowdhry said.

Subsequently, the vendors were blacklisted by government entities. But the disturbing part was that increasingly dealers seemed to be engaged in such practice as retail customers were seen as easy targets, he said.

To help consumers identify counterfeit products, HCL Infosystems recently began an awareness campaign. It has put up pictures across its sales and dealer offices demonstrating how consumers can check for product genuineness. Some of the components one can check for include hard disk, operating system, processor, monitor, power supply and mother board.

"For our PC products, we have introduced a new `Best Assured' seal that is tamper- proof. Once removed/damaged the seal cannot be replaced by anyone," Mr Chowdhry said on the sidelines of a recent seminar on `Innovation', organised by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry. HCL Infosystems has a range of home and office PCs besides laptops and servers.

"We have also written to about 5,000 CIOs to promote this concept in their organisations," said Mr Chowdhry. The company has also tried to impress upon the Government for enforcing more comprehensive quality standards for electronic components.