The government would be requested to look into the possibility of notifying the hardware report in "whatever acceptable form". The CEOs also requested the government to delineate the entire duty structure on IT for a few years.

At a closed door-meeting held at the CII national conference and annual session here on Wednesday, the CEOs expressed concern over frequent policy changes which were affecting their long-term business plans.

The CEOs also requested CII to take up with the Department of Telecommunication (DoT) the "criticality of faster decision-making".Later, briefing the media, NIIT vice-chairman and managing director Rajendra S Pawar said that for speedy growth of internet, wide area networks and IT-enabled services in the country, it had become imperative that DoT take fasterdecisions on crucial issues like provision of high-speed lines and toll-free numbers such as 1800.

"Several multinationals such as GE, United Airlines and British Airways are shifting a lot of their backroom operations to India. Lack of infrastructure at this stage can hamper all-round growth," Pawar said.

It was felt that the business opportunity in IT-enabled services such as call centres, medical and legal transcriptions or data entry could surpass those in software services in the next few years, Pawar added.

Instead of looking up to the government, IT-led organisations should take it upon themselves to push up PC penetration and increase usage. Hence, it was decided that CII would educate its member-companies to use computers more in demand-side operations rather than restricting to production-side applications.

Other issues discussed at the meeting included stirring up the venture capital fund mechanism for IT industry and measures needed to spread the fibre optic network up to the blocklevel.

The meeting was attended among others by Planning Commission member Montek Singh Ahluwalia, department of electronics secretary Ravindra Gupta, Intel's Asia-Pacific chief Atul Vijeykar, Sun Microsystems India managing director Bhasker Pramanik, Microsoft India head Rajiv Nair, Tata Infotech MD Nirmal Jain, Tata IBM MD Ranjit Limaye, Oracle Software India MD Shekhar Dasgupta, NIIT chief operating officer P Rajendran, HCL Infosystems' managing director Ajai Chowdry, SAP India MD Ruth Connolly, Hewlett-Packard India MD Ganesh Ayyar, Cisco India MD Anil Batra, Hindustan Lever IT head Lalit Sawhney and Pawar.