Indeed, there are only a handful of companies addressing this market. One of the biggest players in this segment is Pune-based Modular Systems. Its languages software has become the defacto standard of this industry. Set up by Dr Mehernosh N Cooper and Raghunandan R Joshi, who were colleagues at TIFR, Mumbai, Modular has become a leading software developer for Indian languages.

They got into multilingual software way back in 1983 but Cooper and Joshi have a grouse. "We have done a lot of developing of the area of language technologies but C-DAC gets all thecredit," says Cooper. "It is not fair. Government should be our partner and not our competitor," he adds. But the duo claims it has the satisfaction of doing better than C-DAC. Modular has done well thanks to one very smart move. While C-DAC's packages run on DOS and UNIX, Modular's packages runs on the Windows platform. The appeal of DOS and UNIX is waning as Windows pushes to become the universal platform. This ensures a greater presence in the market and has helped Modular grab a lion's share in the DTP segment with a range of productsIts packages include Shree-Lipi consisting fonts, keyboard handlers and other utilities needed for DTP such as Roopa, the text-based editor, font-styler and Avashikar and Suchika, the multilingual database utilities. The Shree-Lekha package is a solution for multimedia applications such as 3D studio and Autodesk Animator to work on a DOS platform. Prateek Pro is a package for general purpose ID card making. Modular has now come up with a collection of Cliparts, the first ofits kind on a CD, which can be imported in any Window-based application. The 1500-strong Cliparts bank uses only Indian symbols and motifs.

Modular also has the largest library of Indian language typesets. Its products support Indian scripts such as Devanagari, Bengali, Assamese, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Sindhi, Kanada and Urdu. Russian, Sinhala and Arabic have also been developed for the export market. Today, Modular has a bank of 1500 fonts to choose from and is adding 400 more this year.

But its pioneering status in the business has not meant any dramatic growth in business. Though volumes have increased prices have dropped substantially. Few years ago a package of two fonts fetched Rs 25,000. Now you can get 100 fonts for as little as Rs 3,500. So the company's turnover which was Rs 50 lakh in 1990-91 has just touched Rs 2.5 crore in 1997-98. This market has has also been badly hit by piracy. (See Box).

Modular has survived in this difficult scenario thanks to themarketing strategy they adopted. Cooper and Joshi were hardcore technology persons and their expertise lay in product development. So they brought in another company Cirrus Electronic System to handle marketing and distribution. Cirrus' Sanjiv Mehta, an ex-PCL man, knew this was a dormant segment and it made sense to carve a niche in language software. He sees smaller towns as his main market: after all how many traders and small business men in these places will be comfortable with English accounting packages, he asks. There are numerous other possibilities such as land records, voter records, birth-death records, which have to be made in the local language. Cirrus hopes to tap the growing market through its network of 12 branches and 250 dealers across the country.

Modular and Cirrus are pursuing dealers to achieve these targets, even if that means wooing them with holidays in Kathmandu or Pattaya.

Attacking the pirates

Rampant piracy has been a bugbear for Modular Systems. The company hashad to work hard to develop these products and then find a market for them. Piracy is posing a threat to its existence as pirates walk away with the rewards, leaving behind some crumbs.

Piracy also makes it difficult to estimate the market size. For instance in Aurangabad, the company used to sell hardly about three packages a month but to their surprise they found 500 users of their software there who were eating into their legitimate market.

This prompted them to seek police help. In Pune, Modular managed to get some raids conducted. One case is dragging on in a Pune court. Another case is going on in Delhi. Even after acquiring copyright by the hundreds for all its original work it is finding it impossible to protect itself from piracy. "It is difficult for a small company like ours to get involved in anti-piracy activities," says Cooper.

But now a determined Modular has set up an anti-piracy cell with a retired colonel heading it. He is on a mission to Hyderabad where pirates are minting money atModular's expense.

Says Joshi, "This is a big headache but if we do not do so, piracy will have a detrimental effect on our sales."

Modular has done a great deal of work in the Telugu language and had seen good sales in Andhra Pradesh till 1994. Since then sales have declined. The company discovered that in Hyderabad alone there were 300 to 400 illegal users of the software, "Someone had broken the lock-in systems and was selling the software across the coubnter at dirt-cheap prices," Joshi said. Modular is hoping that the police will nab the culprits.