Nasscom for virtual SEZs

IT industry body Nasscom has proposed the idea of virtual special economic zones (SEZs) for the sector to get over the size criterion, which is less relevant for the IT companies compared with the manufacturing ones. Nasscom chairman Som Mittal said here on Friday this would help smaller companies based in Tier-II and Tier-III cities. The term virtual SEZ refers to an SEZ-equivalent tax treatment to an IT company, irrespective of its size.

On the proposals in the draft Direct Tax Code to do away with tax benefits for companies in SEZs from next year, Mittal said Nasscom had asked the government to extend the tax exemption for three more years till 2014. “The government has agreed to grandfathering but that alone will not help. Units will take time to be set up in SEZs, and all those units should get full tax benefits,” Mittal said on the sidelines of a conference on Innovating Education — Technology and Business Trends.

Addressing the conference earlier, he said the expected demographic dividend from having a young population would materialise only if there were effective interventions to make graduates industry-ready. In this context, he suggested that companies offering such training could take support from the government’s National Skills Development Corporation, which is a 51-49 private-public partnership with a corpus of Rs 1,000 crore. “I think it will invest in a result-oriented student training programme,” he said.

The day-long conference, organised by Nasscom and TiE Hyderabad, saw leaders from IT and education sectors as well as investors and entrepreneurs discuss India’s potential to become the world’s laboratory for innovation in education.

BVR Mohan Reddy, chairman and managing director, Infotech Enterprises, said India now needed large numbers of people who are competent, ethically upright and have a global orientation.