Slowdown impact on Indian IT sector to be marginal, says ADB maven

Our eFE Bureau in Bangalore

THE Asian Development Bank has identified three key segments for strategic intervention in the area of information and communication technology (ICT).

Addressing a Round-Table Conference on ICT, ADB’s director, programs department, Mr Yoshihiro Iwasaki, said the segments identified by the bank includes enabling environment for ICT development, building human resources and developing ICT applications and information content in ADB-assisted development projects.

Mr Iwasaki also said that the impact of the slowdown in the technology sector in US and other countries would be modest in India. “India’s exports are in the software sector, whereas the main brunt of the IT slump is in the hardware,” he pointed out. At current rates of growth, India’s software exports could reach $160 billion by the end of the decade, he added.

However, Mr Iwasaki made it clear that it was not realistic to expect high rates of growth would persist year after year. Mr Iwasaki said that theICT sector in India was dominated by a few large companies, unlike thousands of small companies that drive the successes of Silicon Valley.

Andhra Pradesh’s chief minister, Mr N Chandrababu Naidu, said e-governance is going to be the next major revolution in the Internet. Mr Naidu said e-governance could bring down political corruption and bureacratic delays in the implementation of projects. Blaming the lack of infrastructure as an impediment to IT-enabled services, Mr Naidu called for speedy implementation of the infrastructure projects.
Karnataka’s chief minister, Mr SM Krishna, said the challenge before policy-makers was to change the widespread impression that IT belonged to the urban elite.

Despite several initiatives to broadbase the use of IT, most people still considered it a rich man’s game, he said.