Nehru Place finds a notorious place on world map

An official US report has identified Nehru Place in New Delhi among the 30 most notorious IT markets of the world dealing in goods and services that infringe intellectual property rights.

An official US report has identified Nehru Place in New Delhi among the 30 most notorious IT markets of the world dealing in goods and services that infringe intellectual property rights.



"Nehru Place is reportedly one of the many markets in major cities throughout India that are known for dealing in large volumes of pirated software, pirated optical media containing movies and music, and counterfeit goods," said the report released by the US trade representative (USTR) on Wednesday.



This is the second time that Nehru Place, Asia’s biggest computer and accessories market, has featured in the USTR list. The first was in March.

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Housing around 3,000 shops, most of which deal in computers, software and accessories, Nehru Place is estimated to generate an annual revenue of more than R5,000 crore.

“There have been anti-piracy drives at Nehru Place that have largely targeted the retailers, but the need is to generate awareness among people so that the demand for pirated products goes down,” said Sumanta Mukherjee, lead analyst at Cybermedia Research.

Mukherjee felt that if prices of original products, especially software, are brought on par with international prices, the demand for pirated products will come down considerably.

“A case in point is the price of mobile handsets. As handset prices in India are comparable with those in other global locales, piracy of mobile handsets has seen a sharp dip," he pointed out.

“The encroachment in the market by vendors encourages selling of pirated software and other accessories. The authorities have failed to act against these vendors, who are scattered all around,” said V Krishnan of the Progressive Channels Association of Information Technology, which has a major stake in Nehru Place.