Most foreign businessmen and policymakers visiting India have been telling the government that if the information technology industry is to flourish the way it has in the past decade, bureaucracy and red tape must be kept away from the sector.

More so, they said, because the 21st century has been projected the world over as belonging to knowledge-based industries like IT and the research-oriented pharmaceuticals sector - areas where India is seen to have vast potential.

The apprehension, however, is that the situation is changing and regulators and regulations are creeping in. The government tabled in Parliament the country's first cyber bill last month, giving rise to fears that once it enters the statute book, it will be the first step towards strangulating the IT sector.

The Information Technology Bill, 1999, has ampleprovisions to cause such apprehensions, particularly on the issue of the state infringing on the privacy of netizens by arming numerous government-appointed agencies with unlimited powers and even allowing police officials to search and arrest persons without warrants. That too on mere suspicion of a person perpetrating cyber crimes.

Legal experts feel some Draconian provisions of the bill may be challenged in the courts once it becomes law, notwithstanding the government's good intentions of facilitating e-commerce and e-governance.

Despite these drawbacks, the IT industry, however, has reasons to feel elated. The bill represents the government's first real signal on according identical treatment to electronic and paper-based commerce.

"Recent moves by the government have sent very positive signals to the industry and one can expect that more will follow in the future," Azim Premji, chairman of the Wipro group, told India Abroad News Service. "The government, in fact, must take bold and visionarysteps as we have nothing to lose but poverty," he said.

Within the IT industry, e-commerce businesses were most elated with the bill, and with good reason. During the past six months, there has been a mushrooming of portals and e-business ventures, each offering a range of goods and services on the net. In the absence of cyber rules and regulations, they were all looking to the government to facilitate e-business.

"E-commerce has a great potential and we in India do sell goods and services online. But it helps to have legal sanctity for transactions through the net," says Raj Koneru, chairman of Indiainfo.com, one of the larger portals in India that has grand plans for e-commerce. At the moment, e-commerce is restricted largely to business-to- business (B2B) transactions, which account for 90 per cent of the online business in the country. The business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions - an area ith unlimited potential - is at present restricted to buying books, music or flowers.

-- IANS