The Hindu : IT solution for tackling fakes

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Sep 19, 2003

Business

Business

IT solution for tackling fakes

By N. N. Sachitanand

BANGALORE SEPT. 18. The menace of spurious products is endemic and widespread in India. Counterfeits, fakes and pass-offs are prevalent in almost every product category — pharmaceuticals, pesticides, auto components, electrical items, bottled water, branded apparel and footwear, milk, soft drinks, cosmetics, seeds and what have you.

The extent of spuriousness ranges from 20 per cent to 50 per cent of the market, depending on the product line. In fact, a black joke goes that if you want to commit suicide in India, do not use a branded poison, since most probably, it might not be the true stuff!

There are, of course, all sorts of rules, regulations and laws prohibiting the spurious and, recently, the Union Health Minister even proposed the death penalty for peddlers of fake drugs. Unfortunately, in most cases, the customer is unable to spot the counterfeit, till it is too late. Getting reparations from the seller after usage is difficult in this country.

Companies have tried a host of different ways to enable the customer at the point of purchase to be assured that a product is genuine, such as tamper-proof packing, holographic labels, seals and the like. But many of these techniques are either expensive or can be duplicated by the unscrupulous.

Now a California-based specialist software company called Ramsoft Technologies Pvt. Ltd., with its development centre in Bangalore, has come up with a fool-proof solution to this problem. It has designed and built a proprietary framework called REACH which integrates all applications and provides a means of providing dynamic information requested by the user in real time over different means of communication — landline and mobile phones, Internet, cable set-top boxes, gaming consoles and PDAs. REACH was designed as a layered framework which enables easy addition of new devices of introduction of other transport protocols or give "hooks'' to new applications.

Using this framework, Ramsoft proposes a system for two-way content delivery called M-Tag, which will link the point of sales to the supplier. During manufacture, the M-Tag server provides a unique identification code which is imprinted on the product and hidden by a scratch screen. At the point of sale, the customer who wants to authenticate the genuineness of the product can scratch away the screen, read the code number and contact the server through his mobile or a landline or any such communication device.

If the code number is on the M-Tag server data base, the customer will get a message on whichever communication device he is using that the item is genuine. Additional information can also be provided to the customer such as manufacturing date and MRP.

According to Ramesh Santhanam, a founder-director at Ramsoft, M-Tag can be customised fast and cost-effectively. There is no need for specialised hardware — just low-end servers will be adequate. The beauty of the system is that it can be started off with a single function and newer applications can be added on. REACH supports this scaling up. For example, in the case of retailing, features such as loyalty programmes, advertising and information can be added to the authentication function. The supplier will be able to get instantaneous information about how his product is moving in the market.

REACH can be used in many domains and scenarios. It has already been used by Ramsoft to develop for the Switzerland based Publigroupe and Swisscom a service called Qucikandmore.com which enables extension of their print-advertising application to users at large through mobile phones. There are a number of other services which REACH can enable such as movie launches and promotional PR, polling, logistics, customer relationship management and stock movement tracking.

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