IT SECTOR IN INDIA

The Indian Prime Minister has given a call to make India an Information Technology superpower and one of the largest generators and exporters of software in the world within ten years. As an initiating step, a high powered National Task Force on IT and Software Development was set up by the Prime Minister's Office on May 22, 1998, under the Chairmanship of the Deputy Chairman of Planning Commission. This taskforce has mandate to formulate the draft of a National Informatics Policy.(1)
 A special website was created to act as a forum for receiving suggestions, analyzing them and hosting them back on the Website as a structured and classified digest of suggestions from IT Professionals in India and abroad. In 2001-02 the share of Indian electronics and software industry is less than 1% of the world market. This industry contributes about 1% towards GDP of the country.(5) The IT ministry has set up a target of US $50 billion for software exports and US$ 10 billion for hardware export by the year 2008. Ministry of Information Technology will take a lead role and serve as a nodal point for facilitating the initiatives required in the country to achieve the targets.
The satellite WAN, using VSAT technology, has facilitated reliable and quick access from remote areas. The VSAT network acts as an overlay for the terrestrial WAN by providing backup links between the backbone sites. International connectivity is achieved through gateways at New Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai and Calcutta.
The overall production base of the Indian Electronics industry is widely distributed. There are more than 3500 units engaged in Electronics production which include 13 central public sector units with 29 manufacturing establishments, over 65 units in state public sector, about 600 units in organized private sector and more than 2800 units in the small scale sector.(8)
The IT taskforce has planned to increase the PC penetration from the present level of 3.43 per thousand to 20 per thousand by the year 2008. India has achieved the capability of designing and building supercomputers using massively parallel processing technology to address national requirements in science and engineering applications, mission critical applications and business computing. Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has released its latest model - the PARAM 10000, having a peak computing power in excess of 100,000 million floating point operations per second (MFLOPs). This system is now housed in the National PARAM Supercomputing Facility (NPSF) which is being offered for nation wide use to compute intensive applications and research.

 

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