CALCUTTA, Dec 20: The CD ROM market in eastern India is limited to the games and edutainment segment which combines lessons with games. According to dealers and retailers, the CD ROM games enjoy a dominant market share.

However, they feel that although the market in this region is growing faster than the rest of the country, buyers still lack maturity and awareness.

CD Arcade, which began operations only six months back, is the sole distributor for both NIIT Leda CD ROMs and Padmini Multimedia, both of which target young people. Padmini Multimedia is the largest manufacturer of CD ROMs in India. "Whatever we sell is for the Small Office Home (SOHO) market. In fact, the demand is specifically from the home segment," said Soumitra Gupta of CD Arcade. "Around 75 per cent of the demand is from the games segment. The edutainment segment is also doing well and students below the age of 15 years are using these. Older children are mostly interested in games," he added.

According to his estimates, the CD ROM market in Calcutta is currently worth around Rs 1.2 crore and is growing fast.

The lack of awareness among buyers is responsible for the market being restricted to the games and edutainment segments. According to the retailers, it is the children who decide what to buy and the parents just pay the money, especially because the level of awareness is higher among the children than their parents.

Sumana Haldar of Futurecom, which has a retail outlet selling CD ROMs at New Alipore, said, "Even among games, there is a particular segment based on cricket and football which are doing very well. In fact, Anil Kumble's Googly is one of the most popular CD ROMs in our outlet."

Systematix Media has sold some technical CD ROMs too. Its owner Sanjay Chordia said: "We arranged for some mechanical engineering CD ROMs for an interested client. It was difficult to get, but we managed to source it.

That does not mean that there is a latent demand for CD ROMs on technical subjects. The demand is low and due to rare availability in India we are not able to display these at our retail outlets."

Most of the CD ROMs sold in India are imported. "Apart from Padmini, there are other companies like Magic and Kirloskar too and we do not have any complaints regarding the quality of their products," Chordia said, referring to the very few companies which have just started manufacturing CD ROMs in the country.

In the edutainment segment, packages like IBM Worldbook, which is basically an encyclopedia, have done well. But plain titles like Trigonometry have few takers while Karishma, Soldier Boys and Cricket World Cup along with a 15 CD ROM set from NIIT are in demand.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.