India to tap Russia's IT market

By Vladimir Radyuhin

MOSCOW, SEPT. 9. A high-power Indian delegation is arriving in Moscow on Monday to explore Russia's fast growing and potentially huge market for telecommunications and information technologies.

The 27-member delegation, led by the Telecommunications and Information Minister, Mr. Pramod Mahajan, includes a dozen senior government officials, as well as separate teams from the Telecommunications Consultants India Ltd. (TCIL), the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) and the Telecommunications Equipment Manufacturers Association (TEMA). This is the first visit of this kind and it is expected to be largely exploratory.

The delegation will meet the Russian Minister for Communications and Information, Mr. Leonid Reiman, and top executives from Russia's long-distance communications monopoly, Rostelecom, as well as energy sector giants, Gazprom, Lukoil and Transneft, which have set up ramified telecommunications and internet arms of their own.

Information technology was identified as one of the thrust areas for the Indo-Russian cooperation during the visit of the Russian President, Mr. Vladimir Putin, to India last year, and is expected to figure prominently during the planned visit of the Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, to Moscow in November.

Diplomatic sources said Russia can benefit from India's explosive expansion of its fixed line telephone network, computerisation of post offices and schools. India can also become a role model for Russian off-shore software development, e-business and internet solutions, knowledge management and business intelligence tools for the industry.

India is interested in Russia's rich experience in satellite and space station telecommunications and high-end programming. The two countries are already cooperating in advanced computing, with India supplying three PARAM-series computers for a joint computing centre inaugurated in Moscow last year.

With Russia's economy rebounding from a 10-year crisis, its IT and telecommunications market is expected to explode in the years to come.

Last month Russia became the third country in the world after the U.S. and Japan to build a supercomputer capable of 1 trillion operations per second.

Russia already has 6 to 8 million PC users, as many as India does, but for a population one-seventh the size of India's. Russia's wireless and internet markets, also comparable to those in India, are growing at an annual rate of about 50 per cent.

While India has achieved a breakthrough in IT industry doing simple programme coding en masse, Russia, where elite universities graduate thousands of students with excellent fundamental scientific knowledge, is predicted a bright future in offshore sophisticated programming.

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Section  : International
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