U.S. IT cos bags India's major e-governance deals
By siliconindia   |   Friday, 10 September 2010, 22:52 IST   |    3 Comments
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U.S. IT cos bags India's major e-governance deals
Bangalore: At a time when Indian IT industry is lamenting over Ohio banning of state offshoring projects and competing each other to grab more U.S. outsourcing markets, U.S. IT and consultancy firms are signing lucrative deals from India's booming e-governance spends. Interestingly, most of the strategic planning for e-governance in India is done by U.S. consulting firms, though HCL, Wipro, Infosys and TCS have consulting arm, reports The Economic Times. IBM, one of the leading IT provider, is one of the vendors in the 2,000 crore Tax Net project being implemented by the Central Board of Direct Taxes, while its U.S. rival Accenture has landed one of the contracts in the prestigious Unique ID (UID) project. IBM, along with Hewlett Packard, is also competing with home- grown Indian service providers such as Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro and Infosys Technologies for another 2,000- crore contract, which is part of the UID project. Most of the major U.S. IT firms are involved in different deals with the government. Microsoft is involved with the Citizen Service Centre project, while Intel is involved with the WiMax programme. Even smaller projects like LIC's 50-crore CRM project has been awarded to IBM. "U.S. IT company's get almost 80 percent of the consulting assignments. Any e-governance contract we execute the first two questions asked are that how will you secure the data and how will you ensure that strategic control rests with the government. But almost all consulting work is awarded to U.S. firms which creates a security issue and which is almost always structured in a manner to benefit them in the long-run," said an e-governance business head of a tier I IT company. While Ernst &Young is a consultant in the Unique ID programme, PwC consults the central government on the nation's e-governance programmes. Accenture has devised the strategy of India's department of posts programme. "We even invite U.S. companies to participate and look forward to them," said a top e-governance official at the ministry of IT & communication. "Over 50 percent of the budget in e-governance projects goes towards U.S. IT companies, even if we (Indian IT company) win an e-governance contract," says an official involved in e-governance tendering and contracts. "That's because most product companies like HP, Intel, AMD, Microsoft, EMC, Cisco, Red Hat are U.S. based," he explains. The U.S. government IT market is on the other hand a $77-billion untapped potential. Still none of the Indian IT companies feel that US firms should be disallowed from participating. "Nobody likes a closed market. Markets have to open. Only then we can do business. We must not do anything like this because the government of India is entitled to best service. Only by keeping our markets open can we force other markets to be open," said TV Mohandas Pai, Director HR at Infosys Technologies.

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