NEW DELHI: The first meeting of the India-Japan ICT Ministerial Forum will be held here tomorrow in which Dayanidhi Maran, minister of communications and information technology and Taro Aso, minister of internal affairs and communications, Japan will lead their respective delegations.

The India-Japan ICT Ministerial Forum is the outcome of a programme of cooperation, comprising of eight fold initiatives chalked out by the Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh, and the prime minister of Japan, Junichiro Koizumi during the latter's visit to India in March 2005.

The New Delhi meet will mainly aim at the opportunities for increasing ties between Indian and Japanese institutions and industries in the fast growing sectors of IT and telecommunications and the need to leverage the complementarities of each other.

The ministerial level meeting will witness the signing of a joint statement for bilateral cooperation in communications and information technology, wherein both sides will seek to develop joint proposals in R&D, HRD in ICT sector, e-governance, IT enabled services, e-commerce, communications and IT software, rural telecommunication and so on.

The ICT forum will also witness the signing of three separate MOUs by National Institute of Information and Communication Technology (NICT), Japan with C-DAC, C-DOT and IIT Guwahati, to undertake joint programmes in R&D and HRD in the ICT sector.

The second part of the session of the India-Japan ICT forum will witness the presentations by representatives of both the Indian and Japanese industries.

The presentations on behalf of the Indian delegation will be delivered by Kiran Karnik, president, NASSCOM, Anil Ambani, chairman and managing director, Reliance Infocomm, Ramadorai, CEO, TCS, Ramalinga Raju, Chairman, Satyam Computer Services, Sunil Mittal, Chairman, Bharti Telecom and others.

The Japanese delegation will feature presentations by prominent leaders of the Japanese ICT industries such as Yoichi Morishita, cairman, Matsushita Electric Industrial Company (Chairman of Asian Broadband Promotion Council), NTT East Corporation, NTT DoCoMo, Sanyo, Toshiba, NEC, Fujitsu Limited, and NICT, among others.

The groups will evolve a detailed action plan for implementation of the joint statement and would guide the implementing agencies to achieve a meaningful outcome from the India-Japan cooperation. In order to review and monitor the activities of the working groups and the implementing agencies, a joint task force will be set up under the ICT Forum.