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The President, Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, with the Minister for Communications & Information Technology, Mr Arun Shourie, at the STPI awards function at Vigyan Bhavan in the Capital on Friday.

NEW DELHI, June 13

THE President, Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, has called upon governments, industry and academia to outline a roadmap for increasing the domestic IT segment through strong and sustainable use of IT for education, healthcare and e-Governance.

Giving away the STPI Software Exports Awards, he noted that ourindustry employing 5,00,000 people earns $10 billion which is less than 1 per cent of the world market, even as a typical international software company with 50,000 employees earns $ 20 billion through its worldwide operations.

"I suggest that the Government, the industry and the academia can take this issue. Our software industry has to move up the value chain and come up with innovative products that will have a commercial impact in the international market. Based on the current trend, if we have to reach $ 80 billion, we will have to multiply our workforce eight times which may not make our operations competitive. Hence our software industry has to move up the value chain and come up with innovative products that will have a commercial impact in the international market. I am confident that the Indian IT Industry would soon come up with such mega initiatives," he said.

Mr Kalam stated that there was a need for attaining self-reliance in the infrastructural software sector with knowledge products, where domain applications could be developed and deployed for the services sector.

"We have seen that growth of IT and telecommunication in India has established that the data transformed into information has a business proposition with a competitive advantage. I am sure by the end of this decade, entire India will have IT-enabled services in the fields of customer interaction, finance and accounting, data search and integration, tele-education, tele-medicine and e-governance. Our core competencies that can be deployed in addition to what has been planned in 1998 include information security, scientific software development, e-Governance, tele-education, hardware and chip design and wireless. If we work and promote these areas with our core competencies, many Indian IT companies will soon become MNCs," he said.

The President noted that recently Indian IT industries when they were working with various countries in business mode and partnership mode, some hesitations have been seen in a few instances in utilising Indian knowhow. "Whereas in our country we allow large number of business corporates to start IT product industries without any hesitation whatsoever and we treat the IT professionals from other countries with utmost respect," he added.

"I can see a need for a policy discussion for ensuring that the relationship between MNCs/industries of other countries and our Indian IT industries is built on a framework of mutual trust and respect in a two way street", he said.

Earlier, he distributed the awards to IT major Tata Consultancy Services which bagged the Best Software Exporter National award for 2001-02, while Infosys received the second best award.

Wipro bagged the third best software exporter award for 2001-02 with exports worth Rs 1,720.87 crore. For the year 2000-01, Bangalore-based Infosys Technologies received the Best Software Exporter National award with an export revenue of Rs 1,773.32 crore, while Wipro Ltd bagged the second best exporter award with Rs 1,698.61 crore worth of software exports. TCS bagged the third best exporter award with Rs 864.66 crore worth of software and services export revenue for 2000-01.

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