Companies Hail Recent Initiatives In Information Technology

Participants at a session on information technology at the India Economic Summit here were all praise for the recent government initiatives in the sector, even as they urged for a further reduction in red-tape. The India Economic summit is being jointly organised by CII and the World Economic Forum.

Chaired by Sunil Mittal, chairman and group managing director, Bharti Enterprises, the session _ titled `IT Development in government/ industry:

The Tool to enhance productivity' _ focussed on the role that technology and software companies will play in bringing around a veritable IT revolution in the country.

One of the participants revealed that the government has received investment proposals for "hundreds of millions of dollars" for electronic hardware manufacturing units under the soft-bonded IT scheme proposed by the prime minister's information technology task force.

Other participants included N Seshagiri, director general, National Informatics Centre; Dewang Mehta, executive director, National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom); Dhanendra Kumar, additional secretary, department of telecommunications; Ravi Marwah, CEO of Tata IBM; Michael Barnes, manager (government operations), Asia Pacific, Sun Microsystems, Thailand; and, Jacques-Andre Troesch, chief counsellor, Court of Audit and Account, France.

Sources said the speakers urged the government to keep out of venture capital activity. "It (venture capital) should be left to the industry and people who understand the sector," one of the participants said.

The government has suggested that financial institutions float venture capital funds with a corpus of Rs 50 crore each.

In an obvious reference to visa restrictions imposed by the US against movement of Indian software professionals, it was also suggested that the government should concentrate its efforts on convincing its counterparts to scale down non-tariff trade barriers.

"We have reduced import duties on software to zero and will do so in hardware also. This should be got across," was the refrain.

The country should focus on telecom software development rather than the low-level development work.

Some 14 states government have IT policies in place and another seven have set up IT task forces.

Speakers were of the view that the Indian software sector will sustain its rate of growth in future. The sector last year recorded a growth of over 50 per cent.

"It will not slow down. Criticisms of the sector being dependent on the Y2K solutions business are unfounded. The Y2K work accounts for just 12 per cent of the sector's turnover. After that, there will be the Euro-currency work etc.," one of them averred.