Rupesh Sharma is the new President of JCDA

JALANDHAR, INDIA: Rupesh Sharma of Computer Touch was unanimously elected the President of the Jalandhar Computer Dealer Association (JCDA). The elections took place on March 27 with a poor turnout of 35 percent. Sharma was chosen unopposed during the election procedure.

The others who were elected unopposed were Nirmal Singh of C-Tech Computers as General Secretary, Sandeep Goswami of Softech Computers as Jt Secretary, Suresh Juneja of Superdot Computers as PRO and Amit Sakhuja of Amit Enterprises as Treasurer. The names of the executive members comprise Rajesh Gupta, Gurpreet Singh, Bhupesh Kumar and Sukhwinder Singh.

The voting process took place only for electing the new VP in which AS Kumar of Kumar Computers emerged as the winner. He defeated Sukhwinder Singh of DDS Systems by securing 28 votes in comparison to the latter's 14 votes. The only fresh face this time is Suresh Juneja, elected as the PRO of the association.

The new president told The DQ Week about his plans for the betterment of the association. “We will have our first meeting this month where we would discuss about electricity and VAT rates prevailing in Punjab. We plan to go to the government regarding this issue. Partners are losing out their money on a regular basis because of these issues. There is power for only three hours a day. It has become very difficult to work. A lot of times customers go back disappointed. And also, VAT in Punjab needs to be at par with other states to continue a healthy business,” said Sharma.

On issues of increasing the popularity of the association, he further added, “Our main focus will be to add more members to our kitty, maintain discipline and guide or help them to do good business in the computer industry.”

The association proudly boasts of its 120 registered members but sadly only 42 members turned up to cast their vote. “We have elections every year and normally the voter turnout is around 45 to 60 percent. This year it was even worse. May be because of the fact that not many people take interest in the activities of the association. It is indeed very unfortunate,” pointed out Rajiv Khanna, Media Advisor, JCDA. Elaborating on the issue of member participation, Khanna added, “We have elections every year in JCDA. The idea of that is to encourage more and more people to come forward and help the unit in dealing with problems faced by dealers. But still, people are reluctant to come to the forefront.”

Despite all of this, according to IDC, JCDA is one of the top three IT Associations in the country working for the welfare and in the interest of their member computer dealers in Jalandhar for the last 10 years.