Rosy road for Indian IT

President Obama's visit to India from November 6-8, 2010 reinforces our view that, in the 21st century, US needs India more than India needs US. There was a time when Indian Prime Ministers used to visit US to feed the hungry population. Now, the US President visits India to seek jobs.  

The visit has proved to be a win-win situation for both the countries. There is an urgent need to build the good openings that have been made by Obama's visit.  

India is set to become the fastest-growing economy in the world by 2012 and the third-largest in terms of GDP in the next two decades - after China and the USA.    

The SME sector is also gaining importance day by day. Corporates in this sector, which adopted austerity measures during the slowdown, have become more confident now. The corporate honchos feel that there may be some blips here and there, but in the long run the positives will far outweigh the negatives. Our expectations are always much higher, and we have become victims of our own success.  

From the IT & telecom industry perspective, overall PC sales grew 18% to 27.9 lakh units in the July-September 2010 quarter and sales of notebook computers, representing about 40% of the total, crossed 11.1 lakh units during the quarter. After Samsung and Videocon, LG is now looking at Chennai for starting manufacturing operations with an investment of Rs.1,500 crore. In the new manufacturing facility, LG intends to develop and manufacture a new range of India-specific products. After establishing its strong presence in the PC and laptop business, Dell has announced the launch of two 3G-ready smartphones.  

The scope for growth is very vast. Since the domestic market still remains largely unexplored, companies need to come up with innovative solutions to deepen IT penetration beyond the urban masses, especially in the field of telecommunication, by providing a stable broadband connection. The challenge today is to create a robust energy-efficient (Go Green concept) IT infrastructure across the nation to enable easy information access for the common masses and complement Government’s initiatives to enable India emerge as a strong IT manufacturing nation.  

S. Mohini Ratna,
Editor,
VARIndia
mohini@varindia.com