The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) presented a study titled Socio-Economic Impact of Piracy in the Publishing Sector to Secretary, higher education, ministry of human resource development, Mr Ashok Thakur. This is the first study in India that quantifies piracy in the publishing industry using econometric and other quantitative methods. The secretary lauded the efforts of industry in estimating the size and depth of the malaise and called for efforts to stem its growth.
He laid focus on certainty of punishment for those who engage in illegal acts as well as developing greater awareness among students over copyright issues. The study highlights the fact that lower industry revenue leads to lower tax revenue for the government. It estimates that there was tax loss to the government of several crores in 2007-08. This has been steadily increasing over the past few years.
The study uses government data and statistical definitions as reference point and defines the market size of pirated books as a gap between the total expenditure on books by households including students and the supply of books in value terms. Among the sources of data used in the study to estimate the demand and supply of books in the market are data from National Sample Survey (NSS) of Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), Annual Survey of Industries and Census of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME).
On this occasion, Mr Thakur also stressed the importance of providing a competitive edge to workers of the Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) industry which works in tandem with the publishing industry. He suggested CII to take the lead in setting up of centres at universities along with a Sector Skill Council which would provide skill-based training, thereby providing trained man-power to respective industries. He exhorted CII to work in coordination with the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) to build more industry participation inside technical institutes and universities to support the growth of such centres. He promised funding support from the government for such initiatives.
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