Experts in India have confirmed that programmes in such computers would read "99-99", the way April 9 of this year is represented, as "end-of-file" and shut down or perform erratically.

The problem would, however, be temporary and restricted to only Friday, they said.

As India made a late start in computerisation, not many units use this old system of maintaining dates, they said.

Old programmers used a string of nines to indicate end-of-file. The two 99s in "99-99" represent the 99th day and the year 1999.

Reserve bank of India (RBI) has warned all banks about the string-of-nines problem and the British Institute of Standards (BIS) document on Y2K compliance also gives April 9 as a threat to many computer systems, R Ramakrishnan, head of Y2Kcell in the Department of Electronics (DoE), told PTI.

The situation will not be catastrophic, but some systems may stop functioning, especially in the banking sector.

Old computer hardware and electronics systems carrying date-sensitive chips that follow a similar method of keeping dates could also be affected, he said.

The problem will not have much impact on the Indian information technology industry though small and medium organisations might face problems, Vinni Mehta, executive director of Manufacturers Association on Information Technology (MAIT), said.

He ruled out the possibility of many organisations using such software and hardware, saying this method of maintaining dates "is not very popular in this part of the world".

The problem is not universal to all computers and organisations aware of the problem have taken necessary precautions, Dewang Mehta, executive director of Nasscom, said.

According to JR Isaac, advisor at NIIT Ltd, the problem could be corrected in software applicationslike Cobol programmes if users are aware of it, but at the hardware level where chips are concerned, it is difficult.

Fully-automated systems concerned with money transactions with respect to date that face the string-of-nines problem could create more problems, Isaac said.

Real-time systems are more prone to the problem, R Ravi, customer support manager for Y2K at Noida-based HCL Infosystems Ltd, said, adding he had not come across any software package that kept time by tallying a running total of days in an year.

"DoE has not included April 9 in the list of key Y2K dates in 1999 at its Y2K helpdesk site on the internet, but it would be corrected," Ramakrishnan said.