Nasscom calls for improving infrastructure
Wednesday, 08 December 2004, 20:30 IST
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HYDERABAD:If India does not improve its physical infrastructure, it would lag behind its competitors in the information technology sector, the country's premier IT trade body said here Tuesday. "We need to focus on air connectivity, power and roads. Unless we improve this we may lag behind our competitors," Kiran Karnik, president of the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom), told reporters. Karnik said while India was doing well and IT exports this fiscal year were likely to touch $16 billion, the infrastructure remained a bottleneck. Referring to the increased competition from the Philippines, China, Russia and Eastern Europe, he said these countries were improving the infrastructure to attract more IT players. The Nasscom president, who was here to address an industry-academia meet, stressed on the need to improve the quality of IT education and called for increasing the employability skills of graduates. "There should be more interaction between industry and the academia." Karnik voiced concern over the poor demand-supply ratio. "The recruitment ratio is only eight percent. We have to increase it to 14 percent," he said. He called for further lowering the bandwidth cost. "The bandwidth costs have come down as there are more service providers now than in the past. But the costs have to further come down," Karnik said. Despite criticism aginst outsourcing to India during the US presidential elections, the progress this year so far has been good, he said. "The growth continues to be at 30 to 35 percent." During 2003-04 software and services exports grew 30.5 percent, clocking revenues of $12.5 billion. The exports are likely to witness 30 to 32 percent growth to reach revenues of $16.3 billion in the current fiscal year. According to a Nasscom analysis, the Indian information technology-enabled services-business process outsourcing industry is projected to grow 40 percent to clock export revenues of $5.1 billion in 2004-05. The growth last year was 46 percent, earning a value of $3.6 billion.
Source: IANS
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