What purpose do summits serve?

NEWS FROM CYBERABAD

Every January, Hyderabad is the busiest among all the Indian cities in terms of events that take place. First comes the Industrial Exhibition, followed by the CII Partnership Summit, which has become a routine annual event now.

The Dubai World Trade Center-organised Gitex Hyderabad has become another annual event for the city folks. This year, there are two more summits "� Nasscom's iTech 2004 and the second Asian IT Ministers' Summit.

They began on Monday. The two-day Asian ministers' summit is being held here after the first one was held in June 2002 in Seoul (South Korea).

Of the 45 countries expected to participate, around 32 countries from Asia are taking part in the summit, with the notable absence of the Japanese delegation among the major countries.

However, the programme of action and the Seoul declaration which provide basic guidelines for the future summits, seemed to have been ignored by the countries which attended the first summit.

Admitted Arun Shourie, the union minister for information technology and communications, "we have not exercised our minds on implementing the recommendations made at the first summit." He urged the delegates to take a serious note of the declarations of the present summit.

While Shourie was saying this, the delegates from one of the Saarc nations were seen snoring. A majority of foreign delegates could not understand the maps being shown by the speakers during their presentations.

Most of the delegates, obviously bored, were seen chatting outside the summit venue.

Even the union IT secretary, Lakshminarayana, was seen busy talking to others while his minister was speaking, and Shourie had to shout at his secretary asking him to pay attention.

Strange were some of the Indian speakers, who were displaying devices like Simputers to the delegates, which have already been in vogue in some of the Asian countries such as China, Hong Kong and Japan.

While some of the speakers like Randeep Sudan were busy delivering lectures on how to bridge the so-called digital divide, a scribe was heard commenting that some of the Asian countries like Hong Kong were successful in bridging the gap, and none of the speakers seemed to have paid attentio to such developments.

Chief minister Chandrababu Naidu was busy projecting his government's achievements before the IT ministers of different countries, while making no mention about the overall achievements of the country.

For most of the time , minister Arun Shourie (the host) was busy tackling trivial things such as hushing up the audio engineering team near the dais and asking scribes who were loitering in the corridors to go inside the auditorium and listen to the long sermons being delivered by the speakers. A lady journalist had aptly commented about the event as a government-paid junket for the overseas delegates.

Virinchi's improved performance

Virinchi Technologies, a city-based IT services company, seems to have come out of its turbulent performance with the net profit for the quarter ended December increasing from a paltry Rs 20 lakh to Rs 1.64 crore on a year-on-year basis.

Total income jumped up to Rs 3.93 crore from Rs 1.41 crore. For the first nine months of the current year, net profit was at Rs 2.15 crore (Rs 57 lakh) and income was at Rs 6.7 crore (Rs 3.98 crore).