CIITA appoints Garodia to moderate RP-SMA row

Shortly after retracting from taking the Rashi Peripherals and Savera Marketing Agency issue at the national level to keep it contained in the east, Confederation of Indian IT Associations (CIITA) has appointed Alok Garodia of Jupiter International Ltd as moderator to resolve the ongoing tussle.

Garodia will lead the moderation activity with K.L. Lalani, chairman of Lalani Group to assist him and 2 more members from Kolkata are likely to join in the moderation committee soon.

Both industry veterans and past-presidents of Compass, Garodia and Lalani are optimist about resolving the issue amicably with Rashi Peripherals (RP) and as a first measure will be informing members of CIITA about the move and the benefits of the National Distributor Policy (NDP) which the confederation adopted this year.

"As the first step, we will be informing the members of CIITA about the benefits of the NDP and how it can better the channel eco-system. We will thereafter ask RP to implement the NDP for the larger interest of the channel eco-system", said Alok Garodia, member, CIITA.

Further, Garodia will be presenting the larger perspective to the eastern channel community over the NDP and will be informing members about the nitty-gritty of channels.

"Members have been viewing this issue from their own perception as a result of which the larger picture is still shrouded, hence, this issue is dragging on. We will try to resolve it soon", Garodia added.

Also, Lalani said, "We are hoping the issue to be over in a month's time. This issue has been raging on for long and we now need to resolve it as soon as possible".

Lalani further stated that if a majority of common shareholders are there in SMA as well as RP, then according to the NDP, both these entities needs to be treated as one and not as separate units.

Moreover, sources in CIITA has claimed that the share-holding pattern in SMA has undergone some changes but the majority of share-holding still rests with Gopal Pansari who is the director of SMA as well as an employee of RP.

"We need more clarifications on this (shareholding changes) as well as know the details of shareholding pattern in RP as well", an official in CIITA said.

The DQ Week has asked SMA to elucidate the claim from CIITA and is yet to receive a response from SMA.

Over the new move in appointing moderators, Rajiv Poddar, secretary, CIITA stated, "Both Garodia and Lalani are industry veterans and are apt in understanding the channels pulse. They have been involved with CIITA for long and have been contributing to resolve this issue. We are hoping that this disagreement between CIITA and RP will be soon over".

As CIITA seems to be sounding optimist about the appointment of the new committee of moderators in handling the situation, Garodia and Lalani will be starting to address the members of CIITA about the ND policy and the reasons for CIITA taking the steps related to RP and SMA in the last week of December.