CHENNAI, INDIA: Despite slowdown in the IT and ITES industry, the Tamil Nadu Government has invested around Rs. 540 crores in the infrastructure development and buildings in tier two cities.

While participating in ‘Connect2009’ conference here, Dr Poongothai Aladi Aruna, the minister for Information Technology said, “To bring in positive shift despite slow down, we have invested nearly Rs 540 crores for the infrastructure development and buildings in tier II cities like Coimbatore, Trichy, Madurai, Tirunelveli, Salem and Hosur. In these cities, Tamil Nadu Government is establishing special parks for IT and ITES Industries.

She claimed that the unique advantage of tier two cities in Tamil Nadu is just not business overhead but availability of excellent infrastructure, power, air, road and rail connectivity unlike in many other states. She also urged the union minister of Information and Telecommunication to bring in more investments to these parks.

Tamil Nadu every year is churning out lakhs of arts, science, commerce graduates. And we need to find methods to enable them to be employable. Tamil Nadu government jointly with CII started ICTACT (ICT Academy of Tamil Nadu) in the year 2007 to prepare student population to the future requirement. The initiative aims to have a Digitally literate Tamil Nadu.

The department of school education is taking steps to ensure that all high and higher secondary schools have an IT infrastructure in form of computer lab and broadband connectivity. Aruna asked the Union Minister of Communications and Information Technology to encourage big players like Nokia, Sony, Motorola, Airtel and Reliance to make a commitment to set up local language call centres, local language services and devices.

She emphasized the need for developing centres of excellence on research development to bring about indigenous applications, systems, devices that is very easy to understand, implement, maintain and most importantly that should be cost effective.

In Tamil Nadu, export of software remains unfazed despite the recession, we are all set to have second state data centre. E waste policy is to be released soon, rural BPOs will upscaled, we are encouraging all state departments from agriculture to industry to switch to an e-adminstration mode, she said.

The minister said that as the first state in the country is to complete laying the cable, Tamil Nadu would soon be providing the 2 mpbs backbone connectivity. The Government has plans to create 5440 community service centres (CSCs) so that there will be one such centre for every three panchayats. Currently, there are 2000 CSC that are set to be operational.