By Prof. Deepak (Retd.) IIT Kanpur and Founder & Chief Research and Innovation Officer, Checko.ai | Inventor of the World’s First 3D Unclonable Tag

Three decades of research at the intersection of materials science, flexible electronics, and technology innovation have taught me one enduring truth: counterfeiting does not merely erode revenues; it erodes trust. And in education, trust is the foundation on which everything else is built.

I write this as a teacher and scientist, and as a citizen deeply troubled by a problem that our industry has collectively underestimated: the systematic counterfeiting/piracy of books in India and what it is quietly doing to our students, our institutions, our national knowledge infrastructure — and the authors and publishers who sustain it.

India’s Publishing Boom Has a Shadow

India’s publishing sector is a genuine success story. The sixth-largest publishing market in the world and the second-largest among English-language markets, it generated nearly ₹80,000 crore in 2024 across print and digital formats. Driven by rising literacy rates, the explosive growth of competitive examination culture, and rapid regional-language expansion, the market is projected to reach ₹1,25,000 crore by 2030.

But running parallel to this legitimate growth is a shadow economy that most industry leaders have treated as a nuisance rather than a structural threat. That, I believe, is a serious miscalculation.

Industry estimates indicate that nearly 20% of books sold in India are pirated or counterfeit. Applied to the current market size, this implies an annual shadow economy worth approximately ₹18,000 crore. And the numbers are accelerating.

The Data Should Alarm Every Leader in This Room

I want to be specific, because generalisations allow us to look away. Let me share what the data actually says:

890%: spike in seizures of fake NCERT textbooks recorded by government data in 2025 alone — nearly half a million counterfeit copies recovered, with ₹20 crore+ worth of fake textbooks, counterfeit watermarked paper, and illegal printing equipment seized across 29 coordinated NCERT raids.

50–60%: piracy rate estimated for India’s bestselling books, according to FICCI research.

8.12%: of global online piracy traffic originates from India, making it the second-largest contributor in the world after the United States, per MUSO’s 2024 Piracy Trends and Insights Report.

4.3%: year-on-year growth in publishing piracy globally in 2024, the only content category that grew, while film, music, and software piracy all declined.

March 2026: Delhi Police seized over 20,000 pirated books in a single operation, exposing one of the most organised counterfeit distribution networks uncovered in recent years, targeting works by authors including Arundhati Roy, Haruki Murakami, and Yuval Noah Harari.

These are not peripheral statistics. This is a systemic failure operating at scale, and it demands a systemic response.

What This Actually Means for Students

I want to address something that often gets lost in the revenue-loss framing of this conversation. This is not merely a commercial problem. It is an educational one.

When a student in a Tier-2 city opens what they believe to be a legitimate NCERT textbook or a coaching centre guide for NEET or JEE, and it contains printing errors, outdated syllabus content, or missing sections, they do not know it is fake. They study from it anyway. They trust it. And in high-stakes examination environments, even minor content discrepancies can alter outcomes.

Schools and colleges are often unknowing participants in this ecosystem. Bulk procurement through local vendors, without any verification mechanism, means that institutions and the parents who trust them have no reliable way to know whether the materials in their classrooms are genuine.

This is an integrity problem. And for policymakers tasked with raising the quality of India’s educational outcomes, it deserves to be treated as one.

How the Counterfeit Ecosystem Actually Works

From my work in anti-counterfeiting technology, I can tell you that this is not a cottage industry of opportunistic photocopiers. It is an organised commercial operation.

Counterfeit networks reproduce the current editions, purportedly using offset printing techniques that prioritise speed over quality, with poor quality of proofreading. The result is a product that may look similar to the original but contains printing errors, factual inaccuracies, and missing content — as confirmed by CBSE’s official advisory of November 2025. Produced at a fraction of the cost, these copies are sold at steep discounts that make them attractive to distributors looking to make quick money and price-sensitive buyers, particularly in smaller towns and cities.

Distribution flows through decentralised but remarkably efficient channels: coaching centres, exam clusters, informal retail markets, and increasingly, online platforms where seller verification remains inadequate. In high-demand segments like competitive exam preparation, counterfeit copies frequently reach the market faster than official distribution networks, creating an artificial supply advantage.

The ecosystem survives for one fundamental reason: replication remains profitable, scalable, and operationally low-risk. Until the economics change, the behaviour will not.

Why Enforcement Alone Will Not Solve This

Raids help. The Delhi operation in March 2026 and the NCERT crackdowns of 2025 are important signals that the state is willing to act. But enforcement addresses networks. It does not address the unit.

A counterfeiter who loses one warehouse rebuilds three others. The printing equipment, the distribution contacts, the pricing model — none of it disappears with a single raid. What we need, in parallel with enforcement, is to make the act of counterfeiting structurally difficult at the level of the individual book.

This requires rethinking how we design the book itself.

From my scientific perspective, the most durable form of authentication is not checking a book for signs of fakery after it has already been printed and sold. By the time a student, teacher, or administrator spots something wrong, the damage is done. What is needed instead is an identity built into the book at the moment it is made, one that cannot be removed, replicated, or tampered with. This is precisely where Checko intervenes, and where its value for book manufacturers and publishers is most concrete.

How Checko Protects Books at the Manufacturing Stage

Checko’s technology is built on the principle of Physical Unclonability, a concept borrowed from the randomness in nature. During the printing and binding process, a Checko feature bearing a naturally formed, three-dimensional, unique pattern is incorporated into each book unit. This pattern is not printed or designed; it emerges from the inherent randomness of the material’s physical structure. No two labels are alike, and critically, no label can be reproduced, even by Checko itself.  That means Checko tag provides unique and unclonable “fingerprint” to each unit of books, which then can be authenticated much the same way a human fingerprint is used to authenticate people, right at the spot of receiving the book.

For a book manufacturer or publisher, the integration is designed to be operationally seamless. Checko labels can be applied to existing packaging, cover jackets, or binding materials with minimal change to current production workflows. There is no need for expensive RFID chips or NFC infrastructure; the labels work at approximately one-tenth the cost of those alternatives, making them viable for high-volume textbook and mass-market publishing runs.

What This Means Across the Book Supply Chain

Once a Checko is incorporated during manufacturing, every subsequent stakeholder in the chain gains a reliable verification capability. A distributor receiving a consignment can scan a batch to confirm authenticity before stock enters the warehouse. A school administrator can verify a bulk order before it reaches classrooms. A student or parent can authenticate an individual copy using any standard smartphone, with no specialised scanner required, no dependence on internet connectivity at the moment of verification.

Beyond authentication, Checko’s platform provides publishers with distribution intelligence, enabling visibility into where authenticated copies are being scanned, flagging geographic anomalies that may indicate supply chain diversion or grey-market activity. This is not merely an anti-counterfeiting tool; it is a supply chain assurance platform.

The Government of India has already endorsed this approach. IIT Kanpur’s anti-piracy technology, developed from the same research foundation that underpins Checko, was successfully piloted on NCERT textbooks, validating that the approach is not conceptual, it is already in field deployment, and moving rapidly toward full scale within India’s publishing ecosystem

When every book carries a unique, verifiable identity embedded at the point of production, counterfeiting does not merely become harder. It becomes economically irrational because the counterfeit can be instantly identified, and the legitimate copy cannot be replicated.

What I Would Ask of Industry Leaders and Policymakers

I am not here to prescribe a single solution. I am here to make the case that the scale of this problem demands leadership at the publisher level, at the distributor level, and at the level of government policy.

For senior leaders in the books and publishing industry, the questions worth asking are:

•Do our procurement frameworks for schools, colleges, and state-level textbook boards include any authentication requirements? If not, why not?

• Are our distribution partners equipped to identify counterfeit stock before it enters the legitimate supply chain?

• Are we engaging online platforms not just reactively through takedown requests, but proactively through seller credentialing frameworks?

• Are we building authentication into our print production process, or treating it as an afterthought?

For policymakers, the questions are equally pressing:

•  Should institutional procurement of educational materials, particularly for government schools and state curriculum bodies, be conditioned on verifiable authentication standards?

• Should online marketplaces bear greater liability for the authenticated identity of sellers of educational materials?

•  Can we build a national framework that treats educational content counterfeiting with the same seriousness as any other organised crime that systematically harms millions of citizens, because the damage here is not to health, but to knowledge, opportunity, and India’s future workforce?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the architecture of a solution.

The Deeper Stakes

India is investing enormously in its educational future, in infrastructure, in curriculum reform, and in digital access. It would be a profound failure to allow counterfeit materials to undermine the credibility of that investment at the grassroots level.

The counterfeit book market is not just a publishing problem. It is a public trust problem. And trust, once eroded at the foundational level of a student’s learning experience, is very hard to rebuild.

My conviction, forged over three decades in research and reinforced by the work we are doing at Checko, is this: trust must be built into the product, not inspected for after the damage is done. The technology exists. The data is unambiguous. What remains is the will to act.

Finally, it is also important to educate our readers that ethical standards require that we not knowingly buy pirated copies, just because they are cheaper.  In the end, we all lose if there are no good writers left to write these books.

I would welcome a conversation with any leader in publishing, in government, or in institutional procurement who shares this urgency. The problem is large. But it is solvable. And it is time we treated it that way.

Prof. Deepak is the Founder and Chief Research & Innovation Officer of Checko.ai, and the inventor of the world’s first 3D Unclonable Tag, a patented Physical Unclonable Function (PUF)-based technology developed at IIT Kanpur’s National Centre for Flexible Electronics (NCFlexE). He holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and spent over three decades as a Professor at IIT Kanpur before co-founding Checko to bring deeptech-led product authentication to scale.