Certification body for e-commerce soon

By Our Special Correspondent

HYDERABAD, OCT. 13. A certification authority for security- related issues including digital signature which will facilitate e-commerce in the country will come into being within two months, Mr. Rajeev Ratan Shah, Secretary, Information Technology, Government of India, indicated here today.

Inaugurating a national workshop on ``IT policies and their implementation,'' Mr. Shah said transactions in digital signature would start in the next two months with the constitution of the authority. The IT Act of 2000 was already in place.

He also detailed the `mammoth task' of providing bandwidth to every school and college in India by the end of the tenth plan period. There were about 277 universities, 1200 engineering colleges, 250 medical colleges and nine lakh higher secondary schools and the e-infrastructure would reach all these institutions under this ambitious programme. Mr. Shah said special efforts were being made to bridge the digital divide and the Medialab Asia Mission was specifically assigned this task. The mission was aimed at the three layers of Indian population - the top, middle and poor sections. He said IT was capable of tackling illiteracy and poverty in the country in the next five years.

He said IT was being redesignated as Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and added that India was well poised for the giant leap. ``We provide a reservoir of manpower and have established our intellectual ascendancy.''

Mr. Shah admitted that the September 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. did slow down the U.S. economy and caused a temporary setback to IT. Before the terrorist strike, there was a demand for 1,00,000 IT professionals in the U.S., about 20,000 to 30,000 professionals in the U.K. and about 10,000 professionals each in Japan and Germany. But the situation had not altered much. Dwelling at length on the potential of e-commerce, he said Indian e-commerce would reach a level of 1,95,000 crores by 2005 while global e-commerce potential was projected at 6.8 trillion dollars per year by that time. He said multi-purpose smart cards would be introduced for various services. The Postal Department wanted four crore smart cards to convert all money orders into e- commerce. He described the decline of dotcoms as a temporary phenomenon as the online market size proved to be smaller than anticipated.

The workshop was organised by the Administrative Staff College of India with the prime objective of reviewing the present implementation of the IT initiatives and highlight strengths and gaps in IT policies.

Participants have been divided into four groups with specific focus on IT policy relating to Government to Government, Government to Citizen, Government to Business/ Industries and Government to Employee transactions.

Dr. E. A. S. Sarma, Principal of ASCI, in his welcome address, said the country needed an IT policy that was conducive to making India a world leader in both hardware and software industries.

In the present context of economic reforms and globalisation, if the right choices were made early, IT could decisively turn the tide in our favour and ensure that we gain rather than lose in the global process.

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