IT firms eye Govt's 40,000 Crore IT spend

By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 30 June 2009, 01:51 IST   |    4 Comments
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IT firms eye Govt's Rs.40,000 Crore IT spend
Bangalore: Indian government plans to spend 40,000 crore on IT in coming years. One of such initiatives includes The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) which will be headed by Infosys Co-Founder Nandan Nilekani. There are many projects that government is evaluating. This includes a national database for maintaining health records for patients, IT-led modernization of India Post, a massive telemedicine project and a sophisticated technology platform for automating and integrating municipal councils across the country. As economies of developed country like U.S. and U.K. continue to struggle, Indian government's IT plans are being seen as the most lucrative opportunity for IT vendors across the world. Infosys see project worth $1 billion in Indian market while other IT giants like Wipro and TCS are adjusting themselves to gain as much as possible from these projects. "The government has completed a number of pilots and the focus is now on scaling these up," Nasscom Vice President Raju Bhatnagar told economic times. Healthcare is seen as an important sector as government is looking at automation of hospitals to maintain health records of citizens. This will also help government to crack down on spurious medicines market. According to a consultancy company which is advising Indian government on these projects, India will try to make a health care system similar to what U.K has right now. U.K's National Health Services (NHS) might be seen as a model. "We are now looking at a much bigger roadmap for IT-enabled transformation of different services. The focus is now on rolling some critical applications, unlike in the past when we were only looking at establishing state data centres, and common service centres ," said a senior official at India's department of telecommunications and IT. HCL is currently participating in pilots with various state governments and Central departments on a number of biometric devices for such schemes. Meanwhile, many government owned departments are looking to make their services more customer friendly. While Indian railway aims to automate various processes like crew management, train scheduling by spending up to $2 billion in coming years, Indian post wants to establish an agency for delivering many citizen services through automated kiosks.