NEW DELHI, INDIA: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has found a differentiator, besides Ram, to woo voters in the General Election 2009 – Information Technology, according to the April 15 issue of Dataquest. The party is leveraging its IT Savvy image, firmed up five years back, when it was in power at the Center, to reach the younger electorate.

BJP’s IT Vision Document ‘Transforming Bharat’ is the first time any major political party has made a statement of achieving development goals through IT, says an in depth analysis of the relation between IT and the electoral process by Dataquest, the flagship publication of CyberMedia. The promises include a bank account for all Indians, a smart phone for every family below poverty line, broadband facilities in every village and Internet education in each school, each with a significant level of detail, almost like a blueprint.

Promises and Problems

BJP promises 12 million jobs additional jobs across sectors includes employment opportunities in rural BPO and rural content creation in the local language. The e-Education agenda provides 10 million laptops for students with a price tag of Rs. 10,000, a Core 2 Duo equivalent processor and at least 2 GB RAM. Making broadband available has an additional promise of redefining broadband from 256 Kbps to 2 Mbps with 1:1 contention ratio.

However, Dataquest April 15 issue finds that the document is silent on India’s IT/BPO services exports industry—whose direct and indirect impact on Indian economy has been acknowledged by all. The other significant miss is its silence on R&D and IP creation in India.

While the BJP has a stimulus package for driving India’s next phase of growth, it is not fully endorsed by the NDA. So, while development goals such as low cost PC and telecom will not have too many hurdles to implement, when it comes to issues like open source, 1-800 numbers to contact MPs, or even implementation of a national identity system, it is bound to see new discussion, says Dataquest in its cover story “From Ram to IT”.

Indian IT in the Last Five years

Neither the Congress nor the UPA manifesto talks of IT or its role in the development process, though it does talk about national citizen identity cards, setting up of several new IITs, IIMs and upgradation of Polytechnics and ITIs through public private partnership.

To give the Congress it due, Indian IT industry reached its zenith with a few nudges and a largely hands-off approach by the various Congress governments from early 80s onwards. Rajeev Gandhi ushered in the IT Policy, the Software Policy of 1986 and later governments the Telecom Policy.

However, the current Congress led government will leave behind an unfinished IT agenda including 3G spectrum policy, semiconductor policy and e-Governance. e-Governance has had a lot of traction as National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) missed a number of deadlines. The future of STPI scheme, set to expire in March 2010, is not clear. The government has been successful in pushing the private partnership model in various facets of governance quite well. But hardware manufacturing didn’t do any great shakes with the government conveniently ignoring the industry’s long standing demand of bringing down the countervailing duty. The IT Act, introduced in 2000, never got the teeth it needed despite it being amended twice.

Semiconductor Policy announced in March 2007 was expected to attract an investment of Rs.. 24,000 crore by 2010. But till now has received a lukewarm response.

Will Indian politicians be able to leverage IT to reach their vote banks like Obama?

New technologies—the Internet, mobile telephony, CD-ROMs, electronic kiosks, etc—have brought about a tremendous change in the way politics is conducted in developed countries. Factoring the lag in the adoption of technologies between the West and India, there is a fairly good chance that IT would play a significant role in Indian politics as well.

The BJP has a headstart with bi-lingual LKadvani.in. However, the question is whether the average Indian who does not get even electricity for the greater part of their waking hours, and has low levels of literacy, use any IT tool. Moreover, the lack of direct correlation between use of IT and winning elections has made its adoption in the Indian context slow.

On the other hand, there are success stories of ITC’s e-Choupal project, Karnataka’s Bhoomi project, and hundreds of other e-Governance projects, where the end-user and beneficiary has been the nameless faceless Indian. This should be proof enough that IT can connect masses as the Internet moves from mere web-based services to the bulletin boards, mailing lists, and now the mobile.