Mait Plan To Make India A Hardware Design Centre

The Manufacturers Association of Information Technology (Mait) is luring the best computer hardware design talent among the non-resident Indians in America to help make India a cost-effective global design centre.

Today one of our most ambitious programmes is aimed to turn India into the number one global platform for hardware design, Mait president Manu Parpia says.

He said Mait is collaborating with Jaya Kumar, Harvard management professor, and Narayan Vaghul, chairman of the Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India (ICICI), to bring the best hardware design talent and investors of Indian origin from the US.

We are setting up a permanent committee that would provide the linkages between American NRIs and India to make the country a global design centre for hardware, Parpia said.

 

Our objective is to make India the worlds number one hardware design centre by the year 2005. This would help the Indian IT industry move up the value chain, he said.

The Mait programme is designed to encourage NRI entrepreneurs in the IT sector to invest in India, set up joint ventures and transfer technology. They can leverage the countrys competitive advantage in hardware design including software embedded IT products, Parpia said.

Maits other major programme is to enlarge the penetration of personal computers and widen the reach of Internet and networking PCs through the use of Indian languages which it says would reduce corruption.

Parpia says the immediate impact of widespread diffusion of information technology would be the emergence of transparent and corruption-free governance in the country. Mait, which has reported a 50 per cent surge in PC sales this year, believes the widespread IT use will cut away layers of ambiguity in government rules that perpetuate corrupt practices.

Mait is projecting PC sales to touch three million in the next two years from the present 800,000 units and forecasts that the entry of private Internet service providers (ISP) would quicken the spread of Internet and PC penetration.

Corruption-free governance would be the greatest benefit that Indians are set to gain out of IT, Parpia said. When the usage of computers becomes widespread due to increased regional language application in IT use, the country can also expect to have quicker economic growth, he said.

Computer penetration is at present less than one per 1000 as against the world average of 25. Analysts said the growth in PC use will be faster than that of telephones. India has 1.2 telephones for every 100 people.

IT usage would lead to a drastic drop in corruption that thrives on policy inconsistency, a lack of transparency and the high leeway enjoyed by bureaucracy because of discretion in the absence of precise information, Parpia argues.

The Global Competitiveness Report by the Geneva-based World Economic Forum has placed India at the bottom of its ranking. India was placed at 45 among 53 nations which it studied for their economic competitiveness.

One of the major reasons attributed to the lower ranking is corruption because bribery and speed money increase the cost of doing business and also drag down economic growth.

Parpia said Internet has changed the way people do business elsewhere in the world. In India this will help pull down the hierarchical structure in bureaucracy and provide better access to information. This would ensure availability of knowledge even at the lower levels of government. Today corruption flourishes because of face-to-face interaction between the individual, who controls policy decisions, and the person who needs his work done, Parpia said.

He says Internet would provide a series of routes which can be accessed neutrally (without being influenced by other factors) and when the individual fulfils the rules the work is automatically get done.

The Internet privatisation policy is set to help enlarge its subscriber base from the present 40,000 to two million by the turn of the century, industry analysts have said.

Parpia said with the introduction of online computer reservation system in Indian Airlines, travel agencies could no longer unauthorisedly block seats to create artificial scarcity. At Delhis customs department, exporters seeking duty draw back benefits can get their money within 36 hours of execution of export obligations. The exporter gets the drawback money either through check printout or bank transfer, he said. This has eliminated different layers of customs agents and middlemen, and therefore corruption, Parpia said.

He said Mait and the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) are jointly promoting the creation of Intelligent India that envisages greater use of IT. They have launched a joint project, Bharat Bhasha (Indias language), to promote the growth of computing in regional languages, Parpia said.

The hardware manufacturers have been marketing their computers only to five per cent of the Indian population who understand the English language. The aim of Bharat Bhasha project is to make computers accessible to the other 855 million Indians who speak local languages, the Mait chief said.

We are determined to remove the impression that the computer is an elitist tool, he said. Studies have shown that one rupee invested in IT contributes at least twice that to the GDP output. By bringing about a local language interface between computers and the individual we hope to catalyze economic growth, he said.

The Bharat Bhasha project plans to achieve this through a voice-led strategy that would allow the user to turn the spoken Hindi or other Indian languages into print. For that we have to go a long way. In the short-term we have provided, free of charge, use of fonts in Indian languages on our website Mait.com which the user can download. These can be run on any software with Windows, he said.