E-commerce and IT-enabled software services contributed 16 per cent and Y2Kprojects 20 per cent to software exports in the past six months. "Itreflects that e-commerce and IT-enabled services will soon be able to fillthe void created by the absence of further Y2K projects," he added.

Mehta is confident that government control will stay off the softwareindustry. Recently, NASSCOM and McKinsey completed a survey of Indiansoftware industry with future projections. "As per the survey, Indiansoftware industry has been poised to earn a revenue of $87 billion andexports to touch $50 billion by 2008," said chairman of NASSCOM, AtulNishar. Nishar is also the chairman of Aptech and Hexaware Ltd.

In keeping with this, NASSCOM chose `Creating Wealth in the Digital Economy'to be the theme of this year's NASSCOM 2000 and Dotcom as the heart of theexhibition. To assist the Dotcom ventures, there will be a VC (venturecapitalist) clinic at the exhibition grounds.

NASSCOM's current project is to encourage the cable operators to provideInternet services to their subscribers. It has completed a successfulproject with the cable operators in Bhubaneshwar and Bangalore which will bereplicated in other parts of the country. "For Internet connection, a ISPlicense is enough which is easily available. The cable operators will nothave to pay any extra license fee," said Mehta.

As per a NASSCOM survey, about 37 million Indian homes have cable television(TV) connection. Only one million of these TVs have a cable connection whichcan be used for Internet connection. So NASSCOM plans to generate awarenessamong the viewers to attach a cable to their TV-set which would facilitatethe use of a set top box. A set top box converts a TV terminal to a PCterminal with an Internet connection.