Anil Kumar of Cipla, spoke about how counterfeiting of medicines is a concern that affects the end consumer safety as well as the image of the industry. "India’s pharma industry is third largest in the world and 14th in terms of value and is growing at 8-9% annually. Although there are more than 20,000 manufacturing units top 250 control 70% of the industry. Counterfeit market ranges between 11% to 23% of the total value of the market."

HP's A Appadurai pointed out, "The intent to tackle the problem of counterfeiting is high with pharmaceutical companies but they do not necessarily have the technological expertise for developing solutions which lies with the IT companies. Hence, two divisions of HP (Technology Services and Printing) joined hands to develop a solution. "
 
Brand owners at the conference emphasised on the need of authentication for drugs and create awareness. According to A Appadurai of HP, one way to fight counterfeit of any kind of product is to ensure better packaging.

To explore this opportunity, HP showcased the printing capabilities of its digital printing products HP Indigo press WS4500 and WS6000, which it claims can prevent counterfeiting to a great extent. This teamed up with HP’s authentication services for counterfeiting will be a tool to counter fake drugs and products in the market, claims HP.

The authentication service involves instant verification of a medication when a customer is at a drug store or street market. The software involves generation of codes and batch numbers for the pharma labels.

Shankar Raghavan, director-sales of Technology Services, "The owner then sends these batch numbers to the printer and the quality authentication code gets printed on the packaging. Using a basic mobile phone, consumers can send that code via text message to the pharma company owners authentication system which will then send a return message telling them whether or not the medication is legitimate."

The system also enables the owners to define the number of times that particular authentication code can be accessed.
 
During a live demo at the conference, batch numbers along with a message were created and when this scribe sent one particular batch number for authentication, he got the reply within few seconds displaying the message. "This cloud system can do more than just authenticate. It can readily track and trace where drugs are at a certain time, providing valuable intelligence if drugs are stolen or accidentally sent to the wrong location," said Appadurai.  
 
HP Indigo presses offer a range of solutions to combat counterfeiting. They range from the relatively basic bar-coding, numbering and personalisation, to more elaborate solutions using UV techniques, microtext, 2-D barcodes, colour-coding, and smart packaging solutions.  

Apart from medicines, consumer products are prone to counterfeiting. Appadurai added: "Here too digital printing can help reduce counterfeiting to a great extent. For instance a French wine company Chateau Carignan along with HP and a label manufacturer decided to print three different security features possible on HP WS4500. This exercise reduced counterfeiting of wine labels to a great extent."