Nasscom hopeful of better growth rate

The Nasscom, which has pared the growth forecast down post Brexit and US polls, says the industry has the resilience to come back.

Nasscom Chairman and Tech Mahindra Chief Executive Officer CP Gurnani has said that the growth rate estimate was reduced to 8-10 per cent from 10-12 per cent following the US polls and Brexit vote.

“We need to re-energise and reinvent. The industry constantly reinvents itself. This resilience has actually helped it propel to the size of $150 billion from just $40 million about 25 years ago,” Gurnani said.

He said the Nasscom Executive Council will be sitting in Bhubaneswar in a week to take stock of the situation and devise means to re-energise the industry.

“It will take at least a year or so before Donald Trump takes over as the US President. The US will undergo recalibration. Besides the development in Europe post Brexit, you have this this challenge of huge technology shift that is impacting the industry. We have hence revised the growth estimates for the financial year,” he said.

Gurnani is in the city in connection with the Cyber Security Conclave held here on Tuesday.

While accepting that the lower growth rate could impact the job generation, he said it was imperative for job seekers to have multiple skills. “You need to be a multi-skilled professional. You need to be ambidextrous as the industry seeks different sets of skills than it sought a few years ago,” he said.

Giving a preview of the recommendations that the Nasscom Task Force on Cyber Security is going to make to the Union Government, he said India needed at least 10 lakh cyber security experts by 2025. “When we compare ourselves with China, we are nowhere. They have over 1.25 lakh experts, while are saddled with only a few thousand. The IT industry provide jobs to 40 lakh people where as the cyber security alone is going to produce 10 lakh jobs in the next nine years,” he said.

“The size of the industry is just $1 billion in 2016. It is going touch the $35-billion mark 2025,” he said, citing the Task Force study.

With the massive demonetising drive pushing people to go for digital banking applications, the question that comes to everyone’s mind is the availability of digital banking solutions. The Nasscom says there is no dearth of such solutions.

“The real challenge is their adaptability to the specific Indian conditions. You need to suit them to a situation where you have low-bandwidth and where the usage of basic phones is very high,” he pointed out.

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