CMDA to design guidelines for clean business

In a bid to prevent cases of possible fraud, Computer and Media Dealers
Asso-ciation (CMDA), of Pune has decided to draw up a set of gui-delines to
promote clean and profitable business.

The decision is part of the roadmap chalked out by the association for the
year follow-ing the take-over of the new committee. Suresh Joshi, MD, Cache
Technologies Pvt Ltd, is the new President of CMDA for the year 2004-05. The new
com-mittee, however, did not take over the responsibilities of the association
until last week, ow-ing to the annual CMDA Expo.

A letter issued by the new President to the members of CMDA speaks of the new
initia-tives planned by the association for the year 2004-05. Some of these
initiatives include a bi-monthly newsletter, a directory containing vital
information on members including photo-graphs, identity cards for working out
collaborative deals and promoting SI forums and reseller forums.

"Unlike the existing dire-ctory, the proposed members directory would
contain infor-mation on the member, the kind of products he deals in, his blood
group etc. This will help to prevent fraud and can also be given to industries
thus boosting our credibility," Joshi explained.

The decision to moot guide-lines to promote clean and profitable business is
also a fall-out of the recent cases of fraud where members of CMDA have been
duped to the tune of lakh of rupees. In one particular case, there have been 138
cases of cheque bouncing and members have been duped of money ranging between Rs
25 lakh to Rs 30 lakh. The guidelines would provide for alerts against any
possible suspicious fraud-ster and make members come out to prevent others from
being duped.

Since Pune has no SI forum, CMDA has therefore decided to take the initiative
to moot this and also hold meetings with tier III resellers who are not part of
the association. Accor-ding to Joshi, the numbers here were pretty large and
therefore important. Pune has at least 500 such tier III resellers.

In addition, the regular acti-vities such as exhibition, sports, lectures,
seminars on changes in statutory requirements, product training will continue to
be held at regular intervals.

The CMDA has currently over 200 members. Brijen Shah is the Secretary of the
committee, while Satish Taneja of Stech Computers is Joint Secretary of CMDA.

Kausar Dabihya of Taurus Infotek, Suresh Mohite of Aditi Enterprises, Sachin
Salunke of Computer Info-tech, and Murugesh Natara-jan of Duotronics are
mem-bers of the executive com-mittee. The others to join the committee for the
first time also include Shital Nahar of Nahar Integrated Systems, Sunil Gugale
of United Computers, Rajesh Chau-dhary of Asterix Computers and Ghanshyam.

Nanda Kasabe

Pune (CyberMedia News)