By K R Nambiar
Confed-ITA has mooted a new fund raising idea for the welfare of its members which has been christened SOUL (Stand On Your Legs).
The idea came into existence in Coimbatore last year when, in an unfortunate accident, a prominent partner lost his life. “To ensure that the deceased partner’s company, his family and employees did not suffer, the Coimbatore IT Dealers Association (CITA) worked with UPS manufacturer Numeric Power, and appointed the deceased’s firm as a sub-distributor. Each member of the association volunteered to purchase a specific number of products from the sub-distributor, and also agreed to voluntarily pay Rs 50 extra on every product purchased from the partner. This has helped in supporting the deceased’s family and his company,” said P N Prasad, President of Confed-ITA.
With SOUL, Confed-ITA now plans to formalize the welfare fund. “We plan to raise a corpus that will cover even potential business causalities that the association members may suffer. As per the plan, we will work with distributors and request them to collect Rs 100 extra on every
Rs 1 lakh of billing done by our members. This amount will be collected by the distributor and sent to us. All our members have agreed to the plan and now we are in discussion to rope in the distributors. We are hopeful to get their cooperation and will kick start the initiative over the next few days,” explained Prasad.
The fund will also be used to insure members and their employees. Already, last year, Confed-ITA worked out an attractive accidental insurance cover of Rs 50,000 for its members and their employees for a mere Rs 130 annual premium per person. “With the fund in place we will provide a higher cover. Also part of the corpus will be used to set up a permanent office for Confed-ITA,” Prasad added.
The association is in the process of setting up a committee to drive the SOUL project. |