SMS to know if the product you are buying is fake

COUNTER(FEIT) THIS: Consumers can SMS a code to a company which will tell them if the product is authentic.

Featured Blog

Rajdeep Sardesai

Maharaj or Dada, Ganguly's legacy lives on

Featured Slideshows

Mumbai: The power to decide whether the medicine or soap you buy is a fake is now in your hand. All you need to do it to press a few keys on your mobile phone and send an SMS.

Enforcers of Intellectual Property Rights (EIPR), a body providing ground and field force services to crack down on counterfeit, has tied up with PAC Med Biotech and Kezzler technologies to promote the concept in India.

The concept is simple. The products are labelled with a unique code like which the consumers can SMS to a number. A reply from Kezzler's server, which stores the code, will help verify whether the product in question is authentic or fake.

Manpower crunch and the ubiquitousness of counterfeits are the biggest hurdles for enforcers, which they believe this technology could negate in order to facilitate crack-down.

EIPR Chairman, Zahir Khan says, "The biggest advantage is that the field authentication of the product, the determination that a product is genuine or counterfeit is done on the spot. There is a lot of time saving for our investigations. Instead of bringing the product back, getting it analysed, we can know then and there is counterfeit and take immediate action."

Kezzler believes that it will not only empower consumers but also deter retailers from stocking or promoting counterfeit products.

Director PAC Med Biotech, Avi Chaudhary says, "Within the next two years, we will see the emergence of this technology taking a really good foot hold in the three sections of pharma, consumer goods and documentation. It will also provide psychological deterrence for retailers to sell bogus products because they know that they can be caught on the spot."

Kezzler has also tied up with Confederation of Indian Industries in order to create proactiveness among corporates to curb counterfeit.