Speaking at the 18th annual conference of Manufacturers Association of Information Technology (MAIT) on Friday, Celeste said: ``Improving the velocity of the hardware business in India will be one of our moot points for discussions when Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee visits the US in September.''

He also observed that the Indian hardware industry was bogged down by numerous procedural hassles that had kept it away from international level turnaround time.

``India's software sector is a classic example of an industry flourishing due to de-regulation. It is de-regulation that has reinforced the confidence of the American investors in the Indian software sector and this needs to be emulated in the hardware sector as well,'' he said.

``Today, over 60 per cent of PC sales in India are accompanied with an Internet connection. The rate of growth of Internet usage and thus the correlated PC sales growth could be suffocated if the bandwidth availability in India is not rapidly and significantly improved. The demonopolisation of the bandwidth is a step in the right direction,'' added the US ambassador.Comparing the Indian situation to the rest of south-east Asia, MAIT director Vinnie Mehta said the imports of electronics equipment and components forms 47 per cent of the GDP of Singapore and 65 per cent of Malaysia's GDP. The story of China, Thailand and Korea is not too different, he added.

``While most of the South-East Asian economies are harnessing IT and electronic manufacturing for economic prosperity, investments in IT manufacturing in India have remained poor.

An estimated Rs 1,200 crore have been invested in India since liberalisation and a substantial proportion of this has been in picture tube manufacturing,'' added outgoing Mait president Hemant Bharat Ram.Meanwhile, chairman and CEO of Bangalore-based Encore Software Vinay Deshpande has taken over as MAIT president and Tata Elxsi MD S Devarajan has been elected as the new vice president.

In another development, MAIT signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with trade2gain.com, a business-to-business auction market place to enable MAIT members to dispose off their surplus assets and idle inventories on trade2gain's Website.