Mr Kris Gopalakrishnan, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Infosys, has said that the Indian IT industry would grow at a rate of 16-18 per cent as forecast by Nasscom (National Association of Software and Services Companies).

“Compare this with the global growth rate of the industry at 4-5 per cent. Our growth rate far exceeds it,” he told Business Line on the sidelines of the 20th World Wide Web conference on Tuesday.

Declining to indicate numbers for Infosys ahead of the fourth quarter results, he said European Union's recovery was slower than expected.

The industry was looking up in India and it was well on its way to recruit 2-2.5 lakh employees in the next financial year.

South focus

Mr Gopalakrishnan, who chaired the CII's Southern zone, said that Southern States must have a focussed approach on their respective strengths in order to achieve better growth. “Karnataka should focus on IT and ITES and Andhra Pradesh on IT, ITES, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals,” he said.

Chennai should focus on automobile sector, Kerala could look at its strengths of tourism and ayurveda, he observed.

He said Infosys had embraced social networks to allow its employees to collaborate and share and evolve virtual teams. These networks were the best means to gauge public opinion on products and services. “They help in Business Intelligence too in analysing both structured and unstructured data,” he said.

Later, taking part in an industry panel discussion on ‘A Universal, inclusive WWW - The next frontier', he said the developing countries should drive the next wave of growth in the Internet as mobile telephony drove the spread of the Web.

“At present, the Web reaches 200 crore people. But there are 400 crore more people who are left out. And all the future inclusions would be in the developing countries, calling for applications that suit these countries,” he said.

Citing the example of Kenyan mobile banking solutions, he said these applications would first be tested in developing countries before they were expanded to developed countries.