'Politicians yet to fathom IT potential'

By Our Special Correspondent

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, NOV. 24. Eminent space scientist and Member of the Space Commission, Prof. U.R. Rao, has said politicians and bureaucrats were yet to fathom the real potential of Information Technology (IT) as a tool for transforming the nation's fortunes.

Delivering a lecture at the international IT seminar organised as part of the `IT Kerala 2000 Expo', currently on at the Technopark here, he said this "lack of understanding and appreciation of the potential" had prevented IT from making a significant impact in the country.

In the rapidly progressing countries of the world, 60 to 70 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) nowadays came from the service sector. Clearly, the increase in the efficiency and productivity of the service sector following the deployment of IT could have a big impact on national economies, he said.

Everywhere, IT enabled services were already playing a significant role in civilian, administrative, commercial, developmental and even defence sectors. In India, it was yet to reach that level of development.

He said the main reasons for the poor state of IT-enabled services within the country were the slow penetration of personal computers (PCs), inefficient `last mile linkage' and poor infrastructure. "The IT backbone in the country needs to be expanded rapidly. IT education at the school level should be promoted so that we have at least 10 million experts by the year 2008. And the PC penetration should go up from the current level of one PC for 500 persons to one PC for every 50 persons," he said.

Prof. Rao said there were eight indicators involved in IT revolution. But only in the case of one of these indicators could the nation be called not-so-badly positioned--the availability of a fairly large number of skilled persons to handle the technology. In the case of all the other seven indicators like access to main lines, PC penetration, electronic hardware, internet, TV sets and connectivity, the country was still very weak.

"Our vision should be to make India a Global IT Superpower by creating a strong knowledge society, which can use its knowledge to quickly strengthen the nation's socio-economic base. The Government has taken a number of key initiatives for creating a vibrant enabling environment for IT. The new policies have made governmental procedures transparent and eliminated licensing in almost all sectors connected with IT industry. While these initiatives look nice on paper, like many other policy papers, we seem to always falter at the implementation stage," Prof. Rao said.

He said from a modest level of $ 150 million a decade ago, the software industry in the country had now reached an annual turnover of $ 6 billion, of which $ 4 billion came from software export to 86 countries in the world. The national IT task force had projected the software industry turnover to exceed $ 85 billion by 2008, of which $ 50 billion was expected to be the export component.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Southern States
Previous : Keltron set to launch consumer PC
Next     : New member in Travancore family