Hyderabad: Roti, kapda, makan, bijli aur bandwidth is the new slogan that needs to be voiced loud and clear, says Dewang Mehta, National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) president, pointing to the potential investment of close to $7 billion in IT industry in the country over the next two years.Comparing the existing bandwidth in India with China and other countries, Mehta felt the pipeline in the country fell woefully short to service the expected rush of investments over he next 24 months.
Venture capital worth $3.5 billion, an investment of $2 billion on software services, $1 billion on dot.coms and another $500 million on medical transcription services is what is on the drawing boards, he indicated here on Saturday.
He was speaking after the launch of E3S, an e-commerce package developed by the Inna Reddy Computer Associates India Ltd (ICSA). Compared to China's 55 gbps backbone India has a present pipeline of 325 mbps that needs to be jacked up so that every citizen has access to at least 2 mbps bandwidth at the last mile, the president of the apex industry body felt.
Even a company like Cisco has more bandwidth (2.6 gbps) than entire India put together, he observed. Encouragingly, however, the situation should change with the change in policy allowing ISPs to lay submarine cables which is cheaper than satellite connectivity, he said.
Last year, the e-commerce market recorded a turnover of Rs 450 crore, out of which Rs 400 crore was from the B2B sector and asked the centre to simplify the cyber laws.
The cyber laws, which are going to be implemented on August 15 and the legal regulatory framework, will further boost the IT penetration in the country, he added.
The Nasscom chief also called for more foreign direct investment (FDI) in B2B portals. Simplification of the cyber laws and increase in bandwidth will help e-commerce services to boom.
Nasscom has projected Rs 3,500 crore e-commerce transactions, exports of $6.6 billion and $3.5 billion from e-commerce software solutions. By 2008, Nasscom has targeted $87 billion from dotcom companies.
Nasscom is planning to introduce a dotin (dot India) campaign on August 15 in the state to increase the number of Web sites and to promote domain name in vernacular languages.
To help freshers and software professionals, Nasscom is planning to introduce Institute of Software Professionals of India (ISPI) where in the freshers will have six-nine month project work in big software firm and later absorbed according to their merits.
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