The team from Delhi raids Agarwal Book Store in Bistupur on Monday. Picture by Bhola Prasad

Two stores belonging to one of the best-known booksellers of the steel city were raided on Monday for selling pirated material.

The raids at the Sakchi and Bistupur outlets of Agarwal Book Store were carried out by a team from Delhi, assisted by the local police.

The raiding team, comprising director of capital-based Hitaishi Publishers Pvt. Ltd Ganesh Garg, his counsel Rikesh Singh, specially appointed local commissioner Anil Kumar Sahu and officers of Sakchi police station, visited the two stores and seized the pirated books.

Hitaishi, which publishes NCERT books, had earlier approached a Delhi court to seek permanent and mandatory injunction to stop copyright infringement of books printed by it.

It was on the orders of the district additional court in Tees Hazari, Delhi that a local commissioner was appointed and raids conducted with the help of the local police. Officials of Hitaishi Publishers claimed that owners of Agarwal Book Store -- Sunil Agarwal and Naveen Agarwal — were also the owners of Sai Publishing House in Daryaganj, Delhi who have published books that contained material published by Hitaishi.

The books in question are Health and Physical Education, prescribed for CBSE Class XI and XII and its Hindi version Swasthya evam Sharirik Shiksha (Prayogik Pustika). According to Sahu, they seized 2,500 books from Sai publishing’s office in New Delhi, 44 books from Sakchi and 27 books from Bistupur.

According to the team, the books by Hitaishi Publishers appeared under the imprint of Manak whereas Sai Publishing House printed under the name of Sai Gurukul. The books are around 250 pages each and cost between Rs 130 and Rs 150.

“We have got a number of books from here in the city. However, the bulk of the books were recovered from the Sai Publishing House office in Daryaganj. The owners of Agarwal Bookstore did not share their sale invoice and purchase invoice. Had it been just a retail store selling pirated books, it would not have been so serious, but Hitaishi has claimed that the Agarwals are the owners of the publishing house too,” said Sahu.

“We used to send our consignment of published books but we discovered last month that they were selling our content in their name, so we filed a case. NCERT gives us the syllabus and then the publishers are free to design their own content but here they copied our content. In fact the misprints are also the same,” said Garg.

Owners of Agarwal Book Store, however, denied that they had done anything wrong and claimed they were being unnecessarily targeted. Sunil Agarwal, who agreed that they were the publishers of Sai Gurukul books, said that there would be thousands of similar books in the market from other publishers, but Agarwal Book Stores was being singled out.

Agarwal said they were ready to defend themselves and also claimed that owners of Hitaishi had also been booked under similar charges in 2007.

“We did not receive any notice from the court. Secondly, Hitaishi has targeted only Agarwal Book Store for some personal reasons because there are hundreds of authors writing the same textbooks. Had it been fiction or literature, things would been different. Moreover, on a subject like health and physical education, there are bound to be common elements. We are ready to defend ourselves because I have the manuscript of the writers and we pay royalty to them,” said Sunil Agarwal.